Washington, March 20: Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admits to lack of knowledge in the Bush administration about the Iraqi society and ways of rebuilding the country.
However, Rice, who served as national security advisor during the Iraq invasion and later as secretary of state, was unrepentant about the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
“I would many times over liberate Iraq again from Saddam Hussein. I think he’s a danger to the Middle East,” she said in a speech on Friday at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, when asked what she thought she had got wrong.
“But we didn’t understand how broken Iraq was as a society and we tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out. And we really should have rebuilt Iraq outside Baghdad in.”
“We should have worked with the tribes. We should have worked with the provinces.”
Nonetheless, she insisted, the administration “finally got it right” in 2006, the year before a new “surge” strategy was employed to bring down levels of unrest.
——–Agencies