*EPF207 06/26/01
Excerpts: Powell Discusses U.S. Policy in Mideast
(Explains importance of violence reduction on eve of peace mission) (3080)

On the eve of his departure to the Middle East, Secretary of State Colin Powell said reducing violence between Israelis and Palestinians is the first priority.

"...I don't want to lose sight of the most important thing, and that is the level of violence going down," Powell said in an interview he gave to the Associated Press in Washington June 22. The transcript of the interview was released June 25.

Powell leaves for the Middle East June 26 on a trip to encourage the implementation of the Mitchell recommendations for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Mitchell committee, a group of international statesmen headed by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, released a report in May with four recommendations for easing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians: a total cessation of violence, a cooling-off period, confidence-building measures, and a resumption of political negotiations. At present, the parties are engaged in trying to reduce violence, which is still too high, Powell said.

In a wide-ranging interview with the AP, Powell offered his views on an international observer group, the role of CIA Director George Tenet in the Middle East peace effort, and other aspects of the conflict.

Answering a question about Iran, the U.S. government is watching for changes that might stem from the re-election of President Mohammad Khatami, "who is something of a reformer," Powell said.

Following are excerpts related to the Middle East from the transcript of Powell's interview with the AP:

(begin excerpts)

QUESTION: Unfortunately, two Israeli soldiers were just killed in Gaza. I was going to ask about the Middle East, also because your trip is coming up. I have heard two different Arab leaders, Shaath and the Egyptian Foreign Minister, both almost identical pictures for an observer force, for more definition of timeline, but virtually no cooling-off period. In fact, Shaath said yesterday, you know, we should blend it with confidence-building.

Could you tell us how much you might do on those issues?

SECRETARY POWELL: These are all questions and issues that are out there -- a monitoring force, the length of the various segments as you go through the Mitchell Committee Report -- and they will all have to be dealt with -- timelines. They will all have to be dealt with in due course.

But I don't want to lose sight of the most important thing, and that is the level of violence going down. Because nothing starts. And unless the level of violence goes down, Prime Minister Sharon has been very, very clear as to what he wants, and that's zero. And the Mitchell Committee Report calls for the cessation -- unconditional cessation -- of violence.

So all of these other things, I think, flow from what is happening on the ground with respect to violence. For a 24-hour period, the incident rate was quite a bit lower than it had been in recent weeks. But then you have the terrible roadside bomb that kills two soldiers. And I think someone else was wounded. It is hard to say to anybody who is responsible for those soldiers that the level of violence has gone down or is at an acceptable level.

So my consistent theme, since the day I walked into this building, is that we have got to get the violence down, we have got to break the cycle of violence, we have got to restore some level of confidence and trust between the two sides and with their security forces and their security leaders. And until that level goes down and until you have got some confidence built up between those two security forces and the leaders, it is going to be hard to get into the Mitchell Report. That is what the Tenet work plan hoped to do.

And we will see when I get over there next week -- sometime Wednesday or Thursday -- what status we are in and what the two sides think about progress with respect to the Tenet work plan, and how close we might be to the beginning of the Mitchell process. But it is very difficult to predict day to day where we might be because it has been quite a roller coaster.

Q: In fact, the President used the phrase, "crushed," the violence has to be crushed. He was very straightforward about it. The observer force, though, is that a -- Shaath says you have it under study.

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, we always have it under study because there will be demands and expectations, from some of the parties anyway, that there has to be an independent force that will -- or an independent -- not force, but an independent group that will look at incidents that come along so that the incidents have an independent view and not just two people accusing each other and no way of resolving it. And the only way to resolve it is to counter-attack or retaliate, which gets the cycle of violence going back up.

How best to do that remains to be seen. Some people think the EU is the right answer; others have other answers, under the UN auspices. But I have made no judgment about the nature of such a force or its sponsorship. It is all in the area of consideration and study, because until the cycle of violence goes down, until this cycle is broken in a way that is acceptable to the sides, then the question is almost moot.

Q: All right, just a quick follow-up. They do speak in those terms -- the Palestinians and the Egyptians. They would very much like to have the Americans involved, some role.

As you weigh this, are you weighing the possibility that American involvement in some sort of group --

SECRETARY POWELL: I have taken no option off the table. But we have -- you know, there is no plan across the hall about how many Americans will do this, that and the other. But I am keeping all of the President's options open.

Q: Isn't there more at stake here than just the narrow issue of Israel versus the Palestinians? Isn't there a ripple effect here that could affect relations with Arab countries, affect the situation in Iraq, your efforts to get smart sanctions? Could you elaborate on that?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. I mean, there is a great deal of distress throughout the Arab world about this situation. Hopes were built, expectations were raised with the peace process last fall, and with what is often called the Taba arrangement. And then those expectations were not met, and the promise was lost. And I give credit to my predecessors here in the building, and to President Clinton for putting so much energy into it, but it didn't work.

And as a result, that went away and new elections were held in Israel, and before peace comes security. And that has caused a great deal of distress throughout the Arab world, and they want to see this problem resolved, and they would like to see America resolve it right away. But it isn't that easy.

So we are working on it, and we are trying to persuade our Arab friends -- and I think we are having some success with it -- that we are deeply involved, we are involved quietly at a time when you don't see us on-camera. When I am on the phone every day, no one sees it. It is not a TV item. It may be an AP -- occasionally -- interesting item. But it certainly doesn't get television coverage.

But short of being with them in the same room every day, this is the closest thing to it. And I think most of our Arab friends understand the level of our engagement. They can see it in different kinds of ways than they might have seen it last fall.

The fact that the entire international community has rallied around one position, and that is, the Mitchell Report is the answer. It takes a lot of time to bring such a coalition into a coherent, consistent view. And we have been able to do that with the help of the coalition members -- Kofi Annan -- it's not coalition, but a group -- Kofi Annan and Javier Solana and my frequent contacts with foreign ministers who have a particular interest in this, whether it's Joschka Fischer or Hubert Vedrine or Igor Ivanov, in other countries, France, Germany, Russia and others.

So we have been successful in doing that, and frankly I have been getting good marks, at least privately, from the Arab leaders who come and drop by. And it still is the case, however, that good marks aren't as important as getting the job done, which is to get back on a negotiating track leading to a peace process. And there will continue to be unhappiness in the Arab world until we see them doing that.

And it makes it harder, yes, to move our Iraqi policy forward. And there is another element to it, in that the Arab public is far more informed than they might have been in previous years, with television, but especially with chat rooms and the Internet, that tends to field the mass feelings and to pass on the mass feelings.

So yes, it has made things more difficult, and the two issues -- for example, with the situation in the Middle East and what is going on in Iraq -- tend to start getting connected, and the Iraqis try like the devil to connect them.

Q: Are you concerned that some countries in the Arab world might join the rejectionist camp?

SECRETARY POWELL: Rejection of what?

Q: Rejection of peace.

SECRETARY POWELL: No, because there is no alternative. The alternative is absolute chaos, which would serve no one's interest. And so all of us are committed to the peace process, every Arab nation, Israel and the Palestinians. And the reason for that is these two peoples must find a way in due course to live in this one land together, in this piece of land together. And they will have to find out a way to do that in due course. The alternative is chaos and continued death and violence and destruction.

And so we cannot reject a peace process, we cannot reject a movement toward peace, we cannot reject the fact that sooner or later we will have to get in negotiations which will deal with these very, very difficult issues and resolve them.

Q: Will George Tenet have a continuing role in this process?

SECRETARY POWELL: George will play a useful role. I don't think it will be a case of George flying back every week or two. It's not even so much as his official title as DCI as it is the confidence that people have in him because of his previous role in the last shot at this. And so we will use George sparingly, though. George is not going to become a negotiator or a permanent interlocutor.

Q: Will he be doing what he was doing in the Clinton Administration -- meeting with the security forces, officials?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, that is what he did when he went out. But no, he is not replicating that model again.

Q: He's not going back?

SECRETARY POWELL: He may go back, but it is not a matter of him having some quasi-permanent presence in the region.

Q: How would you describe the level of US involvement now, as opposed to the Clinton Administration? I mean, you have just talked about being deeply involved. Do you think that you are engaged as --

SECRETARY POWELL: No, I don't feel any obligation to compare what we are doing to what the previous administration did, and I don't think it is an appropriate comparison anyway. We have a new Israeli Government. We had an election. And the new government came in because the old government was destroyed at Taba. And a new government came in, and it took us a while to wait for them to come in. They didn't take office until early March, and they came in with an approach that said we want peace, but security has to come first.

And so for the Bush Administration to be measured against what my respected colleagues did in the previous administration at Camp David, at the Eastern Shore -- what am I thinking of?

Q: Wye.

SECRETARY POWELL: Wye. Or what they did at Taba or at Sharm el Sheikh. It really isn't an appropriate comparison that we are either doing more or less than they did, because you can check travel schedules. It is an entirely different situation. And I expect to be evaluated against the political and strategic situation we are dealing with now, as opposed to the one that existed in the previous administration or any other prior administration before that.

And I would say that in this Administration, with the new political situation we have and the new dynamics that exist now, we have been very, very engaged. Maybe we haven't had long meetings at these various places, and there is no peace plan that has been put on a table which would generate that kind of long, involved shuttle-type diplomacy. Because the issue has been security, and it is security that has to be achieved, reflected in a breaking of the cycle of violence, so that we can get the Mitchell Committee recommendations going, and then ultimately get through the confidence-building period and then into negotiations again.

Now, once we get into negotiations -- and that is some distance away, some time away -- once we get into that, we may then have to use a different model of involvement, particularly if you are going into very extended, non-stop negotiations. And I have some experience with those kinds of negotiations from my days as National Security Advisor in the Reagan Administration and arms control with the Russians.

But we had a new political and strategic situation that I think required a new way of approaching it.

Q: With the violence having been so persistent there going into these meetings, what in any of these developments do you see as something to be optimistic about?

SECRETARY POWELL: One, they are meeting. Two, George was able to get them -- the meeting before had two levels, as you may know -- I'm sure you do know -- but what we had succeeded in doing before George went out is we did have security officials talking to each other under American hosting. And then we had raised it up another level, and we had Ambassador Indyk and Consul General Schlicher going back and forth. But not a great deal is coming out of those discussions, and they were all security, not political or negotiating discussions.

And then George went over after we had the Mitchell Report, something concrete to work with, and then George went over several weeks after the Mitchell Committee didn't produce an immediate response, and he put down his work plan, which essentially pulled them together on a work plan. And since that work plan was put down and they both accepted it Wednesday before last, if memory serves me correctly, there has been a slight drop in the number of incidents per day, if you were averaging them out. But it is not enough yet.

And there has been some action on both sides to increase access and control the violence, but not enough yet. And so we are still going through this period, but there have been a few hopeful signs.

Q: That is what I am asking about. What are those hopeful signs?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, a few hopeful signs they've been meeting. I mean, they met yesterday. I think they are meeting again tomorrow, and I think the 24th. So the meetings that George put in place are taking place, and they have taken on a more positive tone between security officials.

The Israelis have opened access from -- a level of access that had not existed previously so people can get back and forth. The overall number of incidents per day has been dropping, even though each one is nonetheless unfortunate and a tragedy, and any moment of the day we could have a more serious one.

And so meetings are taking place, they have a somewhat more positive tone, the overall incident level has dropped, not to the level it has to go to. And frankly, it is not a whole lot to grasp, but it is something. And that is what I am going to try to build on when I go there next week.

....

Q: Can I ask you about Iran? You heard what the Attorney General said yesterday about elements of Iran being involved in the Khobar Towers bombing. Your predecessor was reaching out a year ago to the Iranians, not to much effect.

Do the events surrounding the indictment and the statement by Mr. Ashcroft yesterday change anything between the United States and Iran?

SECRETARY POWELL: I don't think so. It shouldn't be a surprise that we have always been concerned about Iranian support for terrorist activities and involvement in terrorist activities. And so the fact that there was an indictment yesterday that points some fingers in the direction of Iran should not shock us or cause us to adopt a policy position that we didn't have the day before.

It reminds us of the nature of this regime. But it is also a country, if not a regime but a country, where 78 percent of the people just reelected a gentleman who is something of a reformer, at least that is one of the appellations attached to him, but he certainly seems to have different ideas than the supreme leaders within the country.

And it is not so much who he is but the fact that 78 percent of the people are suggesting that perhaps they as a country, as a nation, should be thinking in new directions. That I find very, very interesting, and we'll wait and see how that level of political support for President Khatami manifests itself in changed policies.

(end excerpts)

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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