Rice concedes likelihood of thousands of Iraq 'tactical errors'

BLACKBURN, England -- Greeted by antiwar protesters at almost every stop in her tour of England, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the Bush administration has probably made thousands of ''tactical errors" in handling the Iraq war. But she defended the invasion as the right strategic decision.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ''wasn't going anywhere without military intervention," she told a select crowd of British foreign policy specialists in the clubhouse of the local soccer stadium. And, she said, ''you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it."

But, in response to a question about whether the administration has learned from its ''mistakes over the past three years," she said officials would be ''brain-dead" if they did not recognize when they had erred.

''I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice said. ''But when you look back in history, what will be judged is did you make the right strategic decisions."

Rice did not admit to any specific mistakes, and her spokesman, Sean McCormack, later said she was speaking figuratively, not literally.

Rice, a former political science professor, frequently tries to place the turbulent years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon within a broad historical context.

''One of the things that is difficult to tell in the midst of big historic change is what was a good decision and what was a bad decision," she said.

Rice is making an unusual diplomatic trip to the area as part of an effort to learn about countries outside their capitals. She was the guest of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who represents the Blackburn area in Parliament.

Straw spent a weekend in Rice's hometown of Birmingham, Ala., last year, attending a University of Alabama football game and learning about Rice's life growing up in the segregated South.

Whereas many people in Birmingham had little idea who Straw was, Rice is reputed to be the most prominent person to visit Blackburn since Gandhi in 1931 -- and her two-day visit here has proven controversial in an area where 25 percent of the population is Muslim.

A ''Stop Condi" website was set up to organize protesters, and a planned visit to a local mosque was scrubbed. Two helicopters hovered above Rice's motorcade as she and Straw visited an aircraft factory, a school, and the soccer stadium.

About 200 demonstrators gathered outside Pleckgate School, chanting slogans like, ''Hey, Condi, hey, how many kids did you kill today?" and ''Who let the bombs out?" One yellow sign asked: ''How many lives per gallon?"

Jabbar Khan, a 16-year-old student at the ethnically mixed school, said that about 50 children attended the protests. ''We should be proud to have such a high-profile visitor to our school."

Later, when Rice visited the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts -- which former Beatle Paul McCartney had attended and later helped restore -- protesters held red balloons outside and several students greeted Rice by wearing black T-shirts declaring: ''No Torture, No Compromise."

Rice shrugged off the protests, saying she had been delighted by the reception and that she had ''no problem with people exercising their democratic rights."

Perhaps the sharpest comment Rice heard came from former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, a Conservative Party stalwart who served under Margaret Thatcher and who sat on the panel as Rice gave a speech on the need to encourage democracy across the world.

''It is quite possible to believe that" democracy is essential, Hurd told the crowd after she spoke, but also to ''believe that essentially the path must grow from the roots of its own society and that the killing of thousands of people, many of them innocent, is unacceptable whether committed by a domestic tyrant or for a good cause upon being invaded."