[Mb-civic] 'Tactical Errors' Made In Iraq, Rice Concedes - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

'Tactical Errors' Made In Iraq, Rice Concedes

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 1, 2006; A01

BLACKBURN, England, March 31 -- 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.

About 200 demonstrators gathered outside Pleckgate High School, 
chanting, "Hey, Condi, hey, how many kids did you kill today?" and "Who 
let the bombs out?" One yellow sign said, "How many lives per gallon?"

Jabbar Khan, a 16-year-old student at the ethnically mixed school, said 
that about 50 students had "skived off" campus to attend the protests. 
"We should be proud to have such a high-profile visitor to our school," 
he said.

Later, when Rice visited the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, 
which native son Paul McCartney attended and later helped restore, 
protesters held red balloons and several students greeted Rice wearing 
black T-shirts declaring "No Torture, No Compromise." Jon Netton, an 
aspiring actor, said it was an insult to McCartney, an antiwar activist, 
that she was permitted to visit.

The host of a concert in Liverpool that Rice attended Friday night 
canceled his appearance in protest. At the concert, an artist scheduled 
to sing John Lennon's "Imagine" dedicated the song to the protesters 
outside and spliced in words from another song Lennon co-wrote: "All we 
are saying/Is give peace a chance."

Rice shrugged off the protests, saying she had been delighted by the 
reception and that she had "no problem with people exercising their 
democratic rights." She added: "I think if there are indeed different 
views, that it's best to express them, not to keep them bottled up."

Perhaps the sharpest comment Rice heard came from former Foreign 
Secretary Douglas Hurd, a Conservative Party stalwart who served under 
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and was among a panel of experts who 
heard Rice's speech on the need to encourage democracy around the world.

"It is quite possible to believe" that democracy is essential, Hurd said 
to the crowd after she spoke, but also to "believe that essentially the 
path must grow from the roots of its own society and that the killing of 
thousands of people, many of them innocent, is unacceptable whether 
committed by a domestic tyrant or for a good cause upon being invaded."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/31/AR2006033101019.html?nav=hcmodule
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