20 January 2005	Thursday	09 Zilhaj 1425

WASHINGTON, Jan 19: In a rare acknowledgment of mistakes, US secretary of state-designate Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday the Bush administration had made some bad decisions in Iraq and was unprepared for stabilizing the country.

But Democrats complained President George Bush's administration was unwilling to learn from its mistakes to change policies in Iraq, be candid about the cost of continued deployment and develop a better exit strategy.

"We have made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been good, some of them have not been good, some of them have been bad decisions, I am sure," Ms Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity, to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind," she said on the second day of hearings on her confirmation.

Ms Rice's acknowledgment of mistakes followed criticism her testimony on Tuesday belied the reality on the ground in Iraq, where a raging resistance has repeatedly delayed the training of Iraqi forces who would eventually take over from US troops.

Ms Rice declined to predict for senators when US forces would return home but asserted there had been progress in training Iraqis to eventually replace the 150,000 American troops.

Democrats, who accused the Bush administration of misleading the country into war and sending too few troops into Iraq to stabilize it, called for more candour. "We've all got to be honest also with the world, otherwise we'll do terrible damage beyond what we've already done to our credibility," the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen Joe Biden of Delaware, said.

He complained the administration's inability to learn from its mistakes limited its options and ability to respond to other major foreign policy challenges. "It's much harder for the world to rally to our side if we have to face a truly (imminent) threat in (North) Korea or Iran," he said.

Mr Bush has chosen the 50-year-old former Stanford University provost to replace Colin Powell, widely admired abroad and often seen as the cabinet's lone dove stressing diplomacy to resolve crises.

'LACK OF FLEXIBILITY': California Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer, who on Tuesday challenged Ms Rice on the administration's case for invasion, urged her to change policy where necessary.

"It seems to me there is a rigidness here, a lack of flexibility," Barbara Boxer said. The Bush administration, which has pursued its Iraq policy in the face of persistent criticism, has generally avoided acknowledging mistakes.

The New York Times, in an editorial, criticized Ms Rice for failing to admit mistakes, and worried that her unwillingness to change strategy there meant she would simply try to "sell flawed American foreign policy" abroad. -Reuters