Global Security Newswire

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday said the invasion of Iraq would ultimately benefit the United States, but that she "would give anything" to alter past claims that the Middle Eastern state possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of U.S.-led invasion, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Dec. 2).

"I still believe that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is going to turn out to be a great strategic achievement, not just for the Bush administration, but for the United States of America," Rice told Fox News, adding that "you now have a young, democratic, multiethnic Iraq" in place of the Hussein regime.

However, Rice said she wished the United States had been more capable of weighing intelligence assessments regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration made such weapons a cornerstone of its case for war, but no indications of existing Iraqi arsenals or development programs turned up after the 2003 invasion.

"If I had it to do over again, yes, I'd have the system in place that we have now, not the system that we had then," she said, adding that the current system could compare perspectives in "a crisper and clearer way."

Still, much of the world believed then that Hussein's regime held a WMD arsenal, she said (see GSN, Dec. 2). "While it's fine to go back and say what might we have done differently, the truth of the matter is we don't have that luxury. And we didn't at the time," she said.

Asked whether she would have supported the invasion knowing what she knows today, Rice said: "You don't have that luxury. ... We were living in a post-9/11 world in which it was very clear that you shouldn't let threats [multiply] and collect without acting against them" (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Dec. 7).