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Rice Says US Has Made Mistakes in Iraq    [

    Officials Expect No Big Changes, No Matter What Panel Advises
    By Robin Wright
    The Washington Post

    Saturday 02 December 2006

    With the Iraq Study Group report due on Wednesday, the Bush administration has notified allies that it will not budge on certain aspects of Iraq policy, whatever recommendations are put forth by the independent panel of 10 prominent Republicans and Democrats.

    At a private briefing for diplomats this past Wednesday, State Department and National Security Council officials said they do not expect any major policy shifts to emerge from either a White House review or the bipartisan panel, led by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), according to diplomats familiar with the meeting. The diplomats spoke on the condition of anonymity because the briefing was private.

    The officials also said any recommendations for policy shifts would have to fit in with long-term U.S. strategic objectives for Iraq, including ensuring that the nation can govern and defend itself and that it is stable, not a threat to neighbors, and an ally in the fight against terrorism.

    In a further indication that the White House may be digging in its heels, the U.S. officials told the diplomats that President Bush looks forward to seeing the Iraq Study Group report, but they stressed that he will have the last word on what happens next and will not succumb to outside pressure, the sources said.

    On the study group's reported recommendation of a withdrawal of most combat troops by early 2008, the U.S. officials said that any withdrawal would depend on conditions on the ground - and that they would resist the imposition of an arbitrary date.

    Anticipating a recommendation that Washington should adopt a regional approach to the Iraq crisis, however, the officials told the diplomats that the administration might be interested in pressing for action on the Arab-Israeli dispute as a way of defusing Arab anger and showing peaceful U.S. intent in the region.

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    Rice Says US Has Made Mistakes in Iraq
    The Associated Press

    Saturday 02 December 2006

    Washington - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday she is certain the United States has made mistakes in the Iraq war, but the world will have to wait until she is out of government to learn what she thinks they were.

    "As to whether the United States has made mistakes: of course, I'm sure we have," Rice told interviewer Saad Sillawi of the Arabic satellite television station Al-Arabiya. "You can't be involved in something as big as the liberation of a country like Iraq, and all that has happened since, and I'm sure there are things that we could have done differently."

    She told Sillawi, however, that the Bush administration is looking ahead, not backward.

    "When I'm back at Stanford University," she said, "I can look back and write books about what we might have done differently."

    Rice was a political science professor and later provost at Stanford. She was interviewed at a conference in Jordan, and the State Department distributed the transcript in Washington.

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