Interview by Michael Smerconish of WPHT-AM Philadelphia

MR. SMERCONISH:  Let me welcome to the Big Talker in Philadelphia, Richard Armitage, who, of course, is the Deputy Secretary of State.  What a privilege to have you on the program in Philadelphia, Mr. Secretary.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  The privilege is mine, sir.  Thank you.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Thank you.  What can you bench press?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  I used to do about 440, but I'm dropping quickly.  I'm at about 380.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Holy smokes.  Look at the chest on you.  440?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Yeah, when I was a younger man, a more virile man.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Are we talking free weight or universal?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Oh, we're talking free at the time.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  And this is no -- you know, this is no Mark McGuire kind of enhancements, and so forth?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  No, I didn't have the time for any enhancing drugs.  But I will admit to having what they used to call a "golden arches."  But people who lift know what that means.  I'd arch my back.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Unbelievable.  Well, it's good to have you here.  I had Secretary Powell on my program from the White House a couple of weeks ago, and that was a privilege to have him, and I know how closely the two of you work.
 
And it's so appropriate that we should be sitting here with Secretary Armitage after this Spanish election after this Spanish election because I'm on the sidelines and I lack your expertise.  And I'd love to know whether you share my view that it represents a victory for terrorists.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, the Secretary was asked that very question and he said the victory belonged to the socialists who won.  The terrorists lost some ground in Spain.  You saw those millions of people standing with their arms raised.  They were not raising their arms for peace.  They were raising their arms against terrorism.
 
What happened I believe in Spain was a reaction of people against what they saw as a mishandling of the terrorist attack by the sitting government.  And that's probably why the socialists won.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  In other words, you think that the perception was that the ruling government was trying to lay this off on ETA to suit a political objective, and they were held accountable for that?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, I think that was probably part of it.  But there was also a fact that they didn't get what information did exist out in the public, and that added to, I think, the general public view that the government was holding something back.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  So Mr. --
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  But to be fair, there is a certain amount of anxiety that existed in the Spanish public about the whole war in Iraq, and I think that was a small part of it.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  I mean, maybe it was remarkable that the ruling government, despite polls that showed that better than 90 percent were opposed to the war in Iraq, were still leading as that election was advancing and came as close as it did.  I'm just, you know, I'm looking at this with my Philadelphia election background.  I'm a guy who's run -- you know, I ran Frank Rizzo's campaign in 1987, just so you know my --
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Are you sure you want to say that publicly?
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Oh, yeah.  I'm proud of that fact.  But so, I'm --
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  I knew the mayor.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Is that right?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Oh, yeah.
 
(Laughter.)
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  We'll tell some stories during the commercial.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Yes, we will.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  But I'm looking at this and I'm saying, "In the United States, we would have elected the more hawkish of the candidate three days after 9/11."  And that's not what the Spanish did.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Yeah.  As I say, there was a certain amount of anxiety already in the body politic about their whole activities in Spain.  The government of Mr. Aznar was committed to principle, and the principle was standing by their ally, the United States, in the war on terrorism.
 
We'll have to give the new Prime Minister some time to get his sea legs and see how he comes out on things.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  It's 8 a.m.  You're tuned to the Big Talker 1210, WPHT in Philadelphia.  My guest is the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.  We're talking about a whole variety of events.  This is the one-year anniversary, this week, of the invasion in Iraq.
 
I just had a conversation with the Defense Secretary, and my perspective, Mr. Secretary, on this WMD issue is that I wish -- and I'm on the team -- I wish there'd be a different posture taken by the folks in Washington, one that says, "Hey, it would appear that our intelligence was faulty."
 
But this is not only about WMD.  It never was.  It's 9/11.  It's about being preemptive.  It's about the war on terrorism.  I'm not, as someone who wants to see this Administration return to power, I'm not hearing enough of that.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Now the President said he made his decision.  He made it because of a gathering danger to the United States, and it was all the things that you mentioned.  He's not ashamed of it.  He's not backing away from it, and no one else is either.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  But I don't think that there would be any harm in saying that some of the intelligence, in retrospect, is not what we hoped it would have been.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, it would be blatantly obvious, wouldn't it?  Of course it wasn't what we hoped it was.  It wasn't.  Our intelligence wasn't up to snuff, and neither was the intelligence agencies and analysis of almost every one of our allies.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  I read a funny account about how when the Administration was taking shape, you apparently had an interview of sorts with the fellow who's about five or ten feet to my right, meaning Secretary Rumsfeld.  And he was reported to have said to you, you know, "I'm a man of candor, and I have to tell you, you have only a 50/50 shot at being my deputy."  And you responded?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  I responded that I had zero chance of being his deputy.  But to be candid with you, he actually said, you have less than 50 percent.
 
(Laughter.)
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  John Kerry maintains that he's got the support of world leaders.  Now you're the Deputy Secretary of State.  What world leaders could he be thinking of?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  It beats me.  You'll have to ask him.  You could have him on and try to get him to respond.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  No one, I take it, who has bent your ear and said, "Hey, Dick Armitage, we'd like to be for your guy, but unfortunately, it's Kerry."
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  No, absolutely not.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  The situation with regard to bin Laden and the Pakistanis, how cooperative are they being today in helping in that hunt?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  They're getting after it pretty good.  They had another big battle in the -- what's called the FATA, the Federally Administered Tribal Area.  Secretary Powell will be there tomorrow for discussions with President Musharraf and his colleagues, and we're pretty happy with what they're doing.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Are you convinced that the Iraq -- pardon me -- the attack in Madrid was al-Qaida-inspired, as opposed to ETA?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Yeah, it appears that way.  But I think there's a misunderstanding about al-Qaida.  Some seem to view that as something that is solely run out of caves of Afghanistan or a tribal area of Pakistan.  The fact is there is -- as George Tenet has been saying recently -- we've had pretty good success against a lot of the leadership of al-Qaida.
 
But what has happened is the snake has become more autonomous in some regional areas.  And it's a loose grouping of those who share one similar view, and that is a desire to eliminate western secular governments.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  And it would also appear that if they're responsible for Madrid, they have changed their tactics, in that it's not a suicide bombing, but one that was detonated by remote control with cell phones.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  As far as we know, it wasn't a suicide bombing.  There were several that went off.  And I don't know that the forensics have been completed on all of them.  You're correct.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Mr. Secretary, we're here on the one-year anniversary.  I guess I've missed it by a day.  But this week, one year ago, was the invasion in Iraq.  And I want to talk to you about what's to come in Iraq.  One of the concerns that I have is that we have spent a tremendous loss of life and money to give these folks democracy in a part of the world unaccustomed to democracy with no assurance that in the end we're left with a government that's any more favorable toward us than the one that we threw out of there.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Look, yesterday at the Department of State, we hosted a group of visiting Iraqis.  It ran the gamut from a Shia cleric to a pediatrician female.  These are folks who are going to win the war in Iraq because it is their war to win.  We're there to assist them.   But ultimately, it's going to take Iraqis to do it.  And if they do continue to summon the wherewithal and the courage to fight this battle alongside us, I can assure you Iraq will be a better place.  We'll be successful, and that the Middle East will be better off for it.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Richard Armitage is the Deputy Secretary of State.  He's our guest.  What's the election timeline, as we're looking at it now?  There are elections that are going to take place in June?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, they're not elections.  We'll turn over sovereignty to the IGC, the Iraqi Governing Council.  It may be slightly changed, that decision and makeup, but we'll turn over sovereignty.  We will still have three divisions of soldiers in Iraq.  There will still be two multinational divisions in Iraq to help -- standing alongside the Iraqis we're training, both in the army and the police force; then towards the end of the year, there will be elections for a transitional interim government; and finally, at the end of 2005, there will be a constitution which is developed and voted upon.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  So it will be next fall that the Iraqi people will actually go to the polls?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Indeed.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  I was in my hotel room here locally last night watching the news, and I saw that ABC had Peter Jennings over there in Baghdad.  And don't get nervous.  I don't believe everything that I hear him say and watch on that network.  But they had a poll and they were saying, you know, that the folks from Oxford University in England had played a role, and they had a sample size of more than 2,000 folks, and they had gone out person-to-person knocking on doors.
 
Here is what struck me about it, Mr. Secretary.  They said that, by and large, the Iraqi people are not happy with the Americans having toppled their government.  But then they say, "Do you want them to leave?"  And the answer is, well, hell no, we certainly don't want them to leave and not right now.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Now it depends on what polls you look at, doesn't it?  I've got one in my hands just taken.  It says, six out of 10 Iraqis say their country is better off, and seven out of 10 Iraqis say their individually better off, and only 15 percent of them say they want the coalition forces to leave now.
 
If you ask the question of Iraqis, however, do you want "occupation" forces here?  The answer should and will be overwhelmingly, no, that they don't want them to leave now.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Yeah.  And that's exactly what I was making reference to.  So if that's the situation -- and let's cut to the chase -- why is that message -- and maybe it's the reason why I'm here at the Pentagon today, you know, broadcasting to three states in the northeast -- why is that message not a message that I'm getting when I turn on my television set at night?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Like I don't pretend to have been a very good student, but I did take, among other things, economics at one time, and there was a law called Gresham's law which says that bad money grows good money at a marketplace.  So I think there is a Gresham's law in the media, and that is that a bad story will drive good news off the air every time.
 
We've got to do a better job telling our story.  We've got to put more of an Iraqi (inaudible), hence, our visitors that I mentioned yesterday, in the Department of State on this effort.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  What's the significance of the Spanish bailing out of the coalition, if, in fact, they do so in June?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, we'll see what happens in the end of June, if they do or not.  But thus far, none of the other 24-or-so countries that are standing alongside of us have indicated that this will affect them.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  It sounds to me, if I listen to you carefully, what you just said is that you're holding out some hope that maybe you can convince them to stay in.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, we -- this is a brand new Prime Minister who has been elected to Parliament but has never held a ministerial office, and I think it will take awhile to find the sea legs.  President Bush called him and congratulated him yesterday, as well as the outgoing PM, Mr. Aznar.  And we'll give it a little time.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  I want to hit you with something that may sound a little bit off the wall.  But my program --
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Imagine my surprise.
 
(Laughter.)
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  You're thinking to yourself, everything has been off the wall so far.  Why should this be any different?
 
There is a woman, who is an investigative journalist from Oklahoma City, and her name is Jayna Davis, and she did a lot of work connecting dots that suggested that there was an Iraqi involvement in the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.  And when I first heard it, my expression was like the one that you just gave me.  And I brought her to Philadelphia because I wanted to see, you know, does she have three heads, and so on, and so forth?
 
She turned out to be outwardly a very credible individual who had a case that suggested, affidavits, and so forth, that there was Iraqi involvement and an Iraqi cell group functioning in Oklahoma City.  Is it the first that Richard Armitage has heard of Jayna Davis' name or this notion that some people believe there was Iraqi involvement in the bombing of the Murrah building?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  This is the first I've heard of her name and her investigations as well.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  It is.  Independent of that, have you ever had reason to believe or has anyone ever suggested to you that there was Iraqi involvement in the bombing of the Mura building?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  At the time, following the '93 World Trade Center problems we had, I think that we were open to all kinds of speculation.  I was a civilian at the time, and I was speculating while we are on it, and I was frankly doubly devastated.  I found out that it appeared to be homegrown.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Because her case begins with that infamous sketch of John Doe number two, who she thinks she can identify as a person who was in the Iraqi Republican Guard.  But that's obviously not a subject that you --
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Welcome to talk about.  I just -- it will be a one-sided conversation.  I don't have much informa -- I don't have any information on it.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Understood.  If there is a message that needs to be conveyed to the folks who are listeners to my radio program and morning drive in Philly about the "real deal" in Iraq, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage would say it's what?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  The "real deal" is the President has made a commitment.  We're going to stay the course and we're going to see through -- this through -- to success because the only exit strategy is a success in Iraq, and that means federal, Democratic, Republican, which is not a threat to its neighbors nor to us.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Are you holding out hope that WMD are discovered over there?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  It's not a matter of hope.  I'm a realist.  If we find it -- we've found there were programs.  If we find the actual stuff, that will be great and we're going to continue looking.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Are we getting any worthwhile intelligence from Saddam Hussein today?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  I occasionally see the debriefs and he's a pretty wily guy, and he's not giving much information that I've seen, but he seems to be enjoying the debate.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  It's nice to have you on the program.  It's a privilege to have Richard Armitage on the program.  So 440, huh?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  In a former day.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  And what do you figure you can throw up today?
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  I did a 335 this morning, but I wasn't very proud of it.  Yeah.  It was four in the morning.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  You lift at three --
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Four, four.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Four in the morning.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Yeah.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  I've got a guy in Philly (inaudible).  He used to be president of the 76ers, a fitness guru.  You and he, man, I could see that match.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Well, I'd like to meet him because I'm carrying the weight for a guy about 6'8", and when I get my growth spurt I want to be ready for the NBA.
 
(Laughter.)
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  It's a privilege to have you in Philadelphia.  Thank you.  I'm going to take a break.  It's 11 minutes after the 8 o'clock hour; 8:11, you're tuned to the Big Talker 1210.
 
DEPUTY SECRETARY ARMITAGE:  Thanks a mill.
 
MR. SMERCONISH:  Thank you.

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