SECRETARY POWELL: Well, you know, we are not talking about the U.S. coming in. We are trying not to go in. The President has made it clear that his interest is in disarming Saddam Hussein; that was the purpose of UN Resolution 1441. That is the basis upon which the inspectors are going in.

If the inspectors are allowed to do their job, if Saddam Hussein cooperates, the oil remains the property in the hands of the Iraqi people. Now, should he fail to cooperate and military action is required, I can assure you that we would do nothing that would violate the obligations that we have as a military organization going in. As a nation, we took this responsibility on with like-minded nations, and that oil would still belong to the Iraqi people, and would be used for their benefit and for their purposes.

This is not about oil; this is about a tyrant, a dictator, who is developing weapons of mass destruction to use against the Arab populations, and he has used such weapons against Arab populations right in that neighborhood where these articles and editorials you mentioned are being written.

MR. WILLIAMS: It is fair to say, however, though, that the President is having more frustration with our European allies this time around. This is not the same situation as the last Gulf war you served in where Kuwait was invaded and the reasons were more cut and dry?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, you said trouble with our European allies. But I just made reference to a statement that came out of NATO today, which aligned NATO with the United Nations Security Council. I would remind you that the Security Council vote was 15 to zero with a number of our European allies participating in that as well.

Now, was it difficult to get that resolution? Yeah, it took several weeks to do it. But that is what diplomacy is all about. At the end of the day, we were 15 to zero there. At the end of the day here today in NATO, all 19 nations unanimously approved a very strong resolution supporting the U.S. position, frankly, but supporting more importantly the United Nations position.

With respect to our friends in the region, they also welcomed the UN resolution, because it showed that the United States was willing to go to the international community and draw the community together in opposition to Saddam Hussein's dictatorial, brutal policies involving the development of weapons of mass destruction. Even Syria voted for the UN resolution.

MR. WILLIAMS: Is it fair to say the reluctance on the part of the leaders and people in, say, France and Germany has been reversed?

SECRETARY POWELL: I wouldn't say reversed on the part of the people. There are still countries where public opinion clearly is not in favor of military action against Iraq. But right now, we are not talking about military action against Iraq. We are talking about a UN resolution and Presidential determination to see if we can find a peaceful solution to this problem. Everybody wants to talk about the war; the President wants to talk about finding a peaceful solution. At the same time we make it clear that, in the absence of cooperation on the part of Saddam Hussein there may well be a conflict, there may well be a war that will remove these weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam Hussein is going to be disarmed one way or the other. If there is going to be a war, it will be because of Saddam Hussein, not NATO, not the United Nations and not the United States of America.

MR. WILLIAMS: Mr. Secretary, while you've been over there, Bob Woodward's new book has been excerpted and is for sale over here. And in it he paints you as all but a lone voice of caution inside the President's war cabinet, the one man advocating a policy of going more slowly, the one man advocating a policy of going through the UN and expressing fear on your part that you would be put into "the icebox" to squelch your opinion on those subjects. Is that a fair characterization on the part of Mr. Woodward?

SECRETARY POWELL: I have always had open access to the President. I didn't need to be released from an icebox. The President and I have had a solid relationship since the beginning of the Administration. My other colleagues in the Administration that you might be referring to, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others, we all agree that it was the right thing to go to the United Nations.
We had a lot of discussions and debates about what should be in a particular resolution. But that's good. That's good to have such spirited debate within an Administration. What is great about this Administration is that the President has people who have strong views about things and he knows how to accommodate those strong views and we have a strong leader in the person of the President who ultimately tells us what he wants to do, and then we do what he wants to do. He is the one in charge of foreign policy in the name of the American people.

MR. WILLIAMS: So, those who read the book and see a friction inside the President's war cabinet, a split in the war cabinet, you're saying it's more of a vigorous professional disagreement?

SECRETARY POWELL: There are always disagreements inside of a cabinet. There are always debates. I have been in a number of administrations and I have been in a number of positions in the National Security community. And the way you get good results is to make sure that people are in such a cabinet who have strong views and are willing to argue and debate those views and fight for those views. And we are blessed to have a President who can accommodate such debate and then make the decisions that we will all follow.

MR. WILLIAMS: Mr. Secretary, a very basic question. For some Americans who don't seem to understand what some have called the Administration's recent obsession on Iraq, having said that, the new terror warnings here in this country that people are living under and living with every day, what is the split in the time the Administration is spending concentrating on al-Qaida forces that may be a threat to the continental United States and the threat that Saddam might possess?

SECRETARY POWELL: I could tell you this, Brian. The President and all the members of the National Security Council devote a lot of time, of course, to the situation with respect to Iraq. But we devote a lot of time, as you would expect us to to al-Qaida and to the terrorist threat that exists in our own country.

You can't just focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. So while al-Qaida is a definite priority for us and we are going after them -- not a day goes by without another arrest being announced or another cell being identified and broken up, or diplomatic work on our part to get more people involved in this campaign against al-Qaida. We also have to deal with other threats, such as that posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or by what's happened in North Korea, with North Koreans acknowledging, after we challenged them, that they have been conducting uranium enrichment activities toward the development of a nuclear weapon.

The world is very complex. And I believe we can handle more than one of these issues at a time and do so effectively to protect the American people.

MR. WILLIAMS: The final question, Mr. Secretary, on Dec. 8, a report from Saddam Hussein about what is contained in his stores of weapons. What do you expect that to say?

SECRETARY POWELL: I don't know. We will have to wait and see. He better come clean, because we have a pretty good idea of what such a declaration should contain. And we will see whether or not he is serious about cooperating with the international community.

It is almost more important to see his Dec. 8 declaration, not so much for its detail, but for whether or not it is evidence of cooperation on his part. If it is clear in this declaration that he is just playing the same old game, he is not cooperating and he will frustrate the work of the inspectors, that will be a big signal to the international community as to what we might have to do in the future.

MR. WILLIAMS:  Mr. Secretary, thank you for being with us from Prague.