Condaleeza Rice Admits Mistakes Were Made... But We Ain't Changing A Thing

'Tactical Errors' Made In Iraq, Rice Concedes

It would seem that thumping the chest and proclaiming "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" is in vogue within the Bush administration. Admitting that mistakes were made but repeating the same behavior... and expecting different results... has often been touted as the way to define insanity. It would seem that the Bush gang has been given a "life script" to follow, complete with the dynamics of denial, obsession, excuse-making, apologetics and entrenchment. Nothing changes in a dysfunctional system until there is a crisis that insists on change.

The first step to dealing with any type of dysfunction is admitting that there are problems and you do not know what to do about them. Maybe we can set up the Bush gang with their own version of a 12-step program.

Greeted by antiwar protesters at almost every stop in a tour of a working-class region of England, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the Bush administration has probably made thousands of "tactical errors" in its handling of the Iraq war. But she defended the invasion as the right strategic decision.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "wasn't going anywhere without military intervention," Rice told a crowd of British foreign policy experts in the clubhouse of the local soccer stadium here. And, she said, "you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it."

But in response to a question about whether the administration had learned from its mistakes over the past three years, she said officials would be "brain-dead" if they did not recognize where they had erred.

"I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice said. "But when you look back in history, what will be judged is, did you make the right strategic decisions."

Rice did not cite specific mistakes in Iraq, and State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said she was speaking figuratively. Rice, a former political science professor, frequently tries to place the turbulent years since Sept. 11, 2001, within the scope of history.

"One of the things that is difficult to tell in the midst of big historic change is what was a good decision and what was a bad decision," she said.

Rice is making an unusual diplomatic foray to this land of green hills, simple homes and many sheep in an effort to learn about countries beyond their capitals. She was the guest of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who represents the Blackburn area in Parliament. Straw spent a weekend in Rice's home town of Birmingham, Ala., last year, attending a University of Alabama football game and learning about Rice's life growing up in the segregated South.

But while many people in Birmingham had little idea who Straw was -- and Rice is thought to be the most prominent person to visit Blackburn since Mahatma Gandhi in 1931 -- her two-day visit here has proved controversial in an area where 25 percent of the population is Muslim. A "Stop Condi" Web site organized protests, and Rice canceled a visit to a local mosque. Two helicopters hovered above Rice's motorcade as she and Straw visited an aircraft factory, a school and the soccer stadium. Rice entered through the side to evade protesters, and the factory and stadium were almost empty.