WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (AFP) - A Senate panel cleared the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as US secretary of state Wednesday after marathon confirmation hearings that highlighted deep partisan differences over Iraq and the war on terror.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16-2 to approve the choice of Rice, President George W. Bush's national security adviser, to replace Colin Powell as chief US diplomat.
But she will have to wait another week to take over her post, as Democrats asked for the full Senate confirmation vote to be pushed back until next week. Rice had been expected to be confirmed Thursday.
"There will not be a roll call vote tomorrow," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
The committee vote came after Rice, 50, underwent 11 hours of questioning over two days on a range of foreign policy issues, drawing mostly Democratic fire for the Republican administration's hardline responses to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
She staunchly defended the Iraq war against charges it was undertaken under false pretenses and badly managed but acknowledged earlier Wednesday that some "bad decisions" were made and US forces were unprepared for the tough task of post-war reconstruction.
"I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up," she added. "It's how Iraq turns out that really ultimately matters."
She said one of the major lessons learned in Iraq led to the establishment last year of the State Department's Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization to deal with the aftermath of such conflicts.
"We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind," Rice said.
Rice's overall message to the committee was to pledge to restore primacy to US diplomacy and repair battered US alliances after the aggressive, pre-emptive policies that produced two wars in Bush's first term.
Committee Republicans hailed the nominee, a black woman who grew up in the segregated South and went on to become a scholar, trained pianist and policymaker, as a winning combination of grace, toughness and intellect.
"She is an embodiment of the modern day American dream for all people who have an equal opportunity to compete and succeed, regardless of their gender, their race, or their religion," said Senator George Allen of Virginia.
But several Democrats bitterly accused her of misleading the US public on Iraq's nuclear threat, fudging the state of readiness of Iraqi security forces and failing to take a stand on the use of torture against terror suspects.
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who lost the November presidential election to Bush, complained that Rice's testimony merely "predicts more of the same" while Barbara Boxer of California called it "a continuing assault on reality."
"Regrettably, I did not see in Dr. Rice's testimony any acknowledgment of the need to change course or of a new vision for America's role in the world," Kerry said.
Kerry and Boxer were the only dissenting voices in the committee vote. Other Democrats were equally critical of Rice but saw the value of putting the State Department in the hands of one of Bush's closest aides.
"I do think she has the president's ear," said Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the panel's ranking minority member. "And I hope she's willing to take on some of the neoconservative notions in this administration."
Rice will take over a State Department whose authority was badly sapped by Powell's largely unsuccessful battles with the administration's hawks, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
As Bush's top national security aide, Rice often sided against her mentor Powell and with the hardliners. But she vehemently denied in her testimony Wednesday that she was a yes-woman for the president.
"I have no difficulty telling the president exactly what I think. ... Sometimes he agrees, and sometimes he doesn't," she said. "The fact is that I felt very strongly that no one else should ever know the times when he disagreed and when he didn't."
Rice vowed that as chief diplomat, "I will be a strong voice for what I believe and for what the State Department believes is the best course going forward," but she made it clear that Bush would have the final word.
"I want it to be clearly understood that I still believe that we are one administration with the president in the lead."

01/20/2005 01:37 GMT - AFP