WASHINGTON, Dec 1: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday she is certain the United States has made mistakes in Iraq 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,” Ms 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 Mr 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.”

Ms Rice was a political science professor and later provost at the California university. She was interviewed at a conference in Jordan, and the State Department distributed the transcript in Washington.—AP