Rice: We made thousands of errors in Iraq

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

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

Brain Dead

But, in response to a question about whether the administration has learned from its ''mistakes over the past three years," she said officials would be ''brain-dead" if they did not recognize when 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 admit to any specific mistakes, and her spokesman, Sean McCormack, later said she was speaking figuratively, not literally. Read more