BLACKBURN, March 31: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday acknowledged that the United States has made ‘thousands’ of tactical errors in Iraq. But she pleaded that the US and British invasion of Iraq three years ago be judged on its strategic goal — the ouster of Saddam Hussein to pave the way for democracy — as she defended Washington’s policy in the region.

“I know we’ve made tactical errors, thousands of them, I’m sure,” Ms Rice told a gathering of 200 foreign policy experts, local officials and journalists organised by the Chatham House foreign policy institute.

“This could have gone that way, or that could have gone that way. But when you look back in history, what will be judged is did you make the right strategic decision.”

“If you spend all of your time trying to judge this tactical issue or that tactical issue, I think you miss the larger sweep.”

Ms Rice has previously acknowledged mistakes in Iraq’s reconstruction and delays in training Iraqi security forces, but her latest remarks marked the first time that she has spoken of even the possibility of extensive errors.

“I am quite certain there will be dissertations written about the mistakes of the Bush administration and I will even oversee some of them when I go back to Stanford,” she said, referring to the university in California, where she has taught international relations.

She defended the ouster of Saddam Hussein as ‘the right strategic decision’, saying that he had been a hostile element and that ‘we were not going to have a different kind of Middle East with Saddam at the centre of it’.

She added: “Decisions, when you look at them in historical perspective, that were thought at the time to have been brilliant, turn out to have been really rather bad — and vice versa.” —AFP