American national security and American economic interests, of course - every president, every secretary of state - that is the primary goal. As you are in this job and in the work, you begin to see, though, that in the long run, both American economic interests and American national security are better served when there are other decent countries in the world who are both your allies and even when your adversaries are acting more decently.

It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted.

I love to watch football.I actually really love to watch almost any competition with a score at the end.

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.

The PDB (Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.) does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would like to attack the United States. I don't think you, frankly, had to have that report to know that Bin Laden would like to attack the United States.

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

We're in a new world. We're in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn't act.