Condoleezza Rice, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 19 January 2005 for the second day of her confirmation hearings, acknowledged that the Bush administration had made mistakes in the war on terror and that US forces entered Iraq without adequate preparation for post-war stabilization.
Rice had already testified for more than nine hours on Tuesday and returned the following day facing renewed criticism from Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who accused the administration of refusing to acknowledge errors over the preceding four years. A favorable committee vote was expected later that day, with full Senate confirmation of her as Secretary of State scheduled for Thursday.
Rice, who served four years as national security adviser before being nominated to replace Colin Powell, argued that consequential decisions should be judged by their ultimate outcomes rather than in the moment: "It's how Iraq turns out that really ultimately matters."
On reconstruction, she said the US had lacked the skills and capacity required for a stabilization mission of that scale. She cited the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization, stood up within the State Department in 2004, as one concrete lesson the administration drew from the Iraq experience.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in January 2005, in its own words.