Rice says Iraq war was right thing to do

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended on Thursday the Bush administration's record in Iraq after sharp criticism of the war in a new book by a former White House spokesman.

"We did some things well, some things not so well," said Rice, who was national security adviser when the Iraq war began in 2003. "The one thing that I am certain was not a mistake was to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein."

Speaking at a news conference ahead of an international conference on Iraq, Rice said she had not read the book by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, but added that removing Saddam was "the right thing to do."

In his book, McClellan accuses President George W. Bush of using propaganda to sell the Iraq war -- a dramatic break from the close-knit Bush inner circle.

When a reporter at the news conference brought up the book, Rice said at first she would not comment on something she had not read, but then gave a lengthy defense of the decision to go to war.

Rice said people often did not understand the full implications of events until long after they had happened.

She said liberating Iraqis from "the monster that was Saddam Hussein" was neither unilateral nor a mistake.

"It was not the United States of America alone that believed that he had weapons of mass destruction that he was hiding," Rice said.

The Iraq war was fought over charges that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction based on intelligence that later proved to be faulty. Full article

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