Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" interviews U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell

President George W. Bush: Any person, organization, or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent and equally guilty of terrorist crimes. Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups and seeks or possesses weapons of mass destruction is a grave danger to the civilized world and will be confronted. (End videotape)

Russert: “Will be confronted.” This is the State Department report out last week on global terrorism. Let me bring you inside the book and share with our viewers “Cuba...and Sudan...continued to provide support to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” Will we tell the Cubans, “Stop harboring terrorists or else”?

Powell: We have told the Cubans via that report and we’ve told the Sudanese via that report that we still consider them to be organizations which support terrorist activity. The world is changing. The president has taken a strong leadership role in this changing world to say that this is no longer tolerable activity on the part of any nation. Any nation that continues to believe that its political purposes can be achieved by supporting terrorist activity has to know that the civilized world is now speaking out and will act against that kind of behavior. We did it in Afghanistan. We did it in Iraq. We are confronting other nations around the world, and there are ways to confront them, many different ways to confront them. Sometimes no other solution is appropriate but military force. But there are a broad array of tools that are available to the president and available to the international community to deal with these kinds of regimes— isolation, sanctions, pressure, economic activity—many tools that should be used. You don’t always reach immediately for the military tool. In the case of Cuba, we pushed for a resolution in the Human Rights Commission. We finger them, we have been speaking out very strongly with respect to Cuba’s actions, not only with respect to terrorist activity but the way in which they’re treating their own people. I mean, they have been throwing people who choose to speak their own mind, and who have been dissidents, and throwing them in jail for 12, 15, 20 years. Cuba is an anachronism in our hemisphere, an anachronism on the face of the Earth, and the whole international community should be condemning Cuba. Similarly with other regimes, in the Sudan we not only condemn this kind of activity but at the same time we have diplomatic efforts under way to resolve the civil war that has killed so many lives and destroyed so many families in the Sudan, and we are making it clear to the Sudanese that if they’re looking for a better place in the world, a better life for their people, it’s time to end this kind of support of terrorist activity, and we have seen improvement over the years.

Russert: You mentioned criticism of Castro. In fact, some artists and writers from the United States of America, led by Harry Belafonte, said that the United States has been guilty of harassment of Cuba, and this is a pretext for invasion.

Powell: This is absolute nonsense, but we’ve gotten used to absolute nonsense coming from Mr. Belafonte. This isn’t the first time that he has praised the Cuban regime, and it’s outrageous.

Russert: Why wouldn’t we think about liberating the people of Cuba the way we liberated the people of Iraq?

Powell: Well, we do not believe that it is appropriate at this time to consider, if you’re talking of military force, to use military force for this particular purpose. We believe that Cuba is isolated. Cuba is the anachronism that I mentioned a few moments ago. I remember 15 years ago when I was national security advisor and Cuba was fomenting revolution and communist ideology and theology all over the hemisphere. Fifteen years later, every nation in the hemisphere has rejected that point of vie w. They’re all finding their own way down a democratic path with market reforms. They want to be part of a community of democracies of the Americas, they want to be part of a free trade area of the Americas. They’re having different levels of difficulty with respect to practicing democracy. Democracy isn’t an easy system. But Cuba sits there isolated, getting poorer, getting broker and more irrelevant on the world stage, and, sooner or later, this regime will pass. It is an anachronism and history will catch up with it.

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