Condoleezza Rice: "We Want an Immediate Cease-fire Too"

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I find it a very odd way of looking at things that because it's hard and turbulent, that we should wish for the good old days of the false stability of Saddam Hussein and his 300,000 people in mass graves and his chemical-weapons use and his two wars started in a period of 20 years. Or Yasser Arafat stealing the Palestinian people blind, watching the second intifadeh, the Passover Massacre. What Middle East are we talking about?

We are in transition to a different kind of Middle East. And it is very turbulent. It is even violent. But it has a chance, at least, of being a Middle East in which there is a democratic, multiethnic Iraq where people solve their differences by politics, not by repression. It has a chance of having Israel and Palestine live side by side in peace. It has a chance of having a Lebanon that can control its own territory without Syrian forces.

TIME: BUT IF THE SITUATION IN IRAQ CONTINUES TO GET WORSE, IF THERE IS A RAGING CIVIL WAR FOR YEARS, IS THERE A POINT AT WHICH THIS EFFORT HAS CREATED A WORSE ALTERNATIVE THAN WHAT WE HAD BEFORE?

RICE: Well, I guess I would ask the 300,000 people who ended up in mass graves what they think.

TIME: BUT THERE ARE PEOPLE ENDING UP IN GRAVES NOW.

RICE: I don't think that we are anywhere near able to make those kinds of judgments. I don't think Iraq is going to slide into civil war. They have a problem with sectarian violence. [But] I don't think that you're looking at the breakdown of the institutions; people haven't opted out of a unified Iraq. So on your question of what's better, let's be realistic: Where was the military threat? It was from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I don't think you're going to see that from this new Iraq.

TIME: THOUSANDS OF SHI'AS TODAY DEMONSTRATED IN BAGHDAD, SHOUTING "DEATH TO ISRAEL! DEATH TO AMERICA!"

RICE: In these new democratic states, people are going to say a lot of things that we don't like. That's the nature of democracy.

TIME: IS THE U.S. GETTING TO THE POINT WHERE ITS PRESENCE IN IRAQ IS PART OF THE PROBLEM AND NOT THE SOLUTION?

RICE: Well, I do think there are some people who take our presence as an excuse to propagate violence or to stir passions. But I've heard no Iraqi leaders calling for us to leave. And I'm told that in many neighborhoods, the most reassuring sign is, in fact, the American or coalition forces.

TIME: ON IRAN, IS IT POSSIBLE TO BYPASS PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD AND REACH OUT TO A MORE PRAGMATIC FACTION?

RICE: I don't know how to read internal politics in Iran. And I'm probably more cautious about trying to do this than most people because I used to try to read the politics of a totalitarian state [the U.S.S.R.], and we almost always had it wrong.

We have to treat Iran as a whole. Rather than trying to play to one side or another, which I can assure you we don't understand, I think it's preferable to continue to lay out the strategic choices for Iran as to their nuclear program, support for terrorism, support for democratic change. And if there are indeed voices in Iran who are susceptible to the argument that Iran's deepening isolation is a problem, then they will emerge.

TIME: THIS ADMINISTRATION TALKS TO PEOPLE LIKE THE CHINESE, WHO DO THINGS THE U.S. DOESN'T LIKE. SO WHY NOT TALK TO SYRIA, HAMAS, HIZBALLAH?