The PRINCESS OF BAGHDAD

An edited transcript of Condoleezza Rice’s speech at the American Embassy in Baghdad, formerly the Republican Palace, headquarters of the Saddam Hussein.

May 15, 2005: CHARGE D’AFFAIRS, JIM JEFFREY: Let me introduce someone you know, the Secretary of State, Dr. Rice. (Applause and cheers)

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SECRETARY RICE: Thank you, thank you. First, just let me say what a thrill to be in Baghdad. I can’t even tell you how excited I’ve been about coming, how delighted I am to be here. I just took the helicopter ride in -- this is a spectacular city, it really is. At least, what’s left of it! (Cheers, whistles, applause)

I want to start by thanking Jim Jeffrey for his leadership of our 1000 strong team in this former Palace. I know that he is a dedicated servant, I see him on our video conferences, and he has given wonderful leadership. Jim has restored the swimming pool in record time. (Cheers) I want to thank him for that. And to thank Saddam Hussein for putting it here in the first place. There’s more water in that pool than the whole of Iraq! (Laughter) And more smart bureaucrats in this Embassy than in my Washington office! It was you guys who isolated the $184 million from US Govt funds earmarked for Iraq’s drinking water projects and used it instead to top up this Embassy’s repair budget, as well as the swimming pool. Isn’t that neat? I can’t thank you enough for your service.

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You people are truly on freedom’s front lines. And I thank you for that. Unfortunately, Iraqis are still facing massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhoea, nausea and kidney stones from drinking contaminated water, but freedom isn’t meant to be easy. Not for them, and not for us. I know that there are people here who are on active duty, I know there are reservists here, I know that you’re away from family and friends and that you’re in harm’s way. But remember, you’re not in as much in harm’s way as the citizens of Iraqis. Over 400 have died violently in the short time since we got them to form a Government. That’s on top of, oh let’s say between the 50,000 and a 100,000 that have been blown away since we arrived to liberate the oil fields. In the US today, just walking through the financial district of Houston, you often hear how proud people are, for the job that you’re doing here, thank you very, very much.

And I want to thank our private contractors. Talk about keeping the cowboy spirit alive! The foreign media often describes you people as “behaving like an invading army”, and I think that proves you’re really representing the United States so very well. Privatising the industries of Iraq and putting them in US hands will help freedom prosper. And help our freedom to prosper. Like using Iraq’s own oil revenues for projects that were supposed to be covered by American tax dollars – that is, once we secure the pipelines. You contractors were among the first to display leadership skills at Abu Ghraib, which even your critics acknowledge. By working as a team to humiliate, torture and abuse Iraqi prisoners, you were able to increase demand for your corporation’s interrogation services. That’s smart strategy, one that helps locals understand our pre-emptive business culture, and I thank you for that.


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Now, this is a tough environment sometimes, maybe all of the time, but I want you to stay focused on what it is that we are doing here. Softening up Iraqis for democracy by any means necessary. You see, this war came to us, not the other way around.

I know what you might be thinking. Oh, the war didn’t come from Iraq, but that’s only because Saddam didn’t have the means or the motive. So what am I saying? The United States of America, when it was attacked on September 11, realized that we lived in a world in which we cannot let threats gather, and that we lived in a world in which we had to have a different kind of Middle East if we were ever to have a permanent peace. It just could not continue to be a Middle East in which dictators like Saddam Hussein paraded around, lived in great palaces, and yet tortured, and oppressed, and just made mincemeat of this wonderful infrastructure here in Iraq. Instead, it would have to be the United States that has a Middle East in which our military parades around, lives in great palaces, and yet tortures and oppresses and makes mincemeat of this wonderful infrastructure here in Iraq. Then rebuild it for a profit.

We just couldn’t let Saddam Hussein stay on, a man who has been a danger to this region for his entire reign, never more so than when we used to sell him chemical weapons.

We realized we had to have a chance to work with people in the Middle East who wanted a different kind of life, because the absence of freedom in the Middle East, the freedom deficit, especially for the people of Palestine we have ignored for so long, but I can’t really say that outside these walls, is that it has produced the ideologies of hatred that led people to fly airplanes into a building on a fine September day.

People don’t want to be suicide bombers, people don’t want to be suicide hijackers. They would much rather bomb villages from gunships high in the sky and use remote controlled drones to murder those they suspect. But first, people need to the freedom to get rich, so they can buy their weapons from us. For many many years, the United States, along with the rest of the free world, believed somehow that people in this region didn’t care about freedom. We cared about stability, and what we got was neither freedom nor stability. We got a malignancy that was growing, that came to haunt us on that fine September day.

And now it’s another fine day in Iraq, as I stand here radiant in this white tropical Valentino pants-suit talking of freedom, while our close ally in Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, is killing hundreds of his own citizens, mainly Muslims. Shooting them dead in the town square for daring to dream of freedom.

There is no point on the Earth where people do not want to be able to say what they think, where people do not want to be able to worship as they please, where people do not want to be free of the knock of the secret police at night. But such people can’t always have what they want, not if they are unlucky enough to ruled by a dictator who we support. And support strongly. Okay, the brutality of Islam Karimov is similar to that of Saddam Hussein, but that’s not the point. Karimov runs an efficient secret police; he beats, he jails and he tortures his critics – one of them famously boiled alive in oil – but he has his good points. First, he gave us a military base from which to launch our attack on the Afghanis, who to this day remain ungrateful. Another good point about Karimov, is that he is helping us out with a problem involving the 150 or so prisoners held by the CIA, the ones singled out for torture. Egypt can’t be expected to handle them all, so Uzbekistan has put at our disposal its extensive apparatus of inquisition. They will even provide the boiling oil! (Laughter) Uzbekistan has plenty of it – 116,000 barrels a day, to be exact. All this in the name of freedom. All in the name of cheap gas and of Helping America – which is what our allies are for.

These are our universal values, and America has always been at its best when it is securing, and providing for, and bringing these values to the rest of the world. Because you know something, when freedom is on the march, America is more secure, and when freedom is in retreat, America is more vulnerable. Trouble is, freedom is on retreat within America, so I don‘t know where that leaves us.

Anyway, our children, and our children’s children, will look back, and they will say, we are so grateful that there were Americans willing to sacrifice, and to kill, so that the Middle East could be whole, and free, and democratic, and at peace. And that never again would we have to fight terrorists on our soil, in America.

So thank you for what you do every day, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. I bring you greetings from your commander-in-chief. And I thank the men and women in uniform, I thank the diplomats here and all the others, who are making the dream of freedom possible for Iraqis. And you know, they deserve it. Even if the dream is currently a nightmare.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE transcript, Office of the Spokesman.

OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT: http://usinfo.state.gov/usinfo/Archive/2005/May/16-275013.html