Reply #1: Bonus footage from the extended DVD set: Sen. Feingold

[TayTay]

Sen. Feingold: Madame Secretary, we owe our service members some clarity and leadership. And we owe this country some serious thinking about how we can get our Iraq policy on track -- on track so that it helps rather than hinders us in the broader fight against terrorism.

And in that regard, Madame Secretary, I want to return to this subject that Senator Biden and Senator Kerry were talking about, which has to do with whether to withdraw the troops, should we withdraw -- start withdrawing the troops. I want to hone it to the issue of whether it would be a good idea to have a public, flexible time table that we would suggest to finish the mission, achieve our goals, and bring the troops home. Notice, I said "a flexible time table", not a drop-dead date, not a deadline, not cut and run. So that's what my questions are about.

And it's interesting that Senator Kerry quoted a very Republican former Wisconsin congressman who was Defense secretary under Richard Nixon: Melvin Laird. Let me quote something else from that same article that Senator Kerry mentioned. Melvin Laird said, "We owe it to the rest of the people back home to let them know that there is an exit strategy. And important, we owe it to the Iraqi people. Our presence is what feeds the insurgency. And our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency." I'd like your reaction to Melvin Laird's remarks.

SEC. RICE: Well, Senator, I simply don't agree that it is our presence that is feeding the insurgency. I think that the insurgents have a couple of aims. One is to return -- for some of them, it's to return to a day when high-ranking Ba'athists were in power who repressed by force Shi'a and Kurds -- and by the way, a fair number of Sunnis, too, who were in political opposition. That's one goal for some of them. For others -- and that means, yes, the fact that we liberated Iraq is an irritant, from their point of view, because they have a different view. They would prefer the Iraq that we were dealing with under Saddam Hussein.

For the Zarqawi element of this, however, I would return to what Senator Voinovich said. These people were not just pacific people somewhere sitting around, and then we liberated Iraq and they decided there was a jihad to fight. This jihad, this violent, extremist ideology has been developing in the heart of the Middle East out of the absence of freedom and the absence of hope for a very long time. It reached its full bloom -- after several initial starts it reached its full bloom on September 11th when they flew those airplanes into those buildings.

Now, we are fighting the global war on terrorism because, of course, we are tracking down and fighting the al Qaeda network. And I was just in Afghanistan, which used to be their home base and is now --