US secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice has conceded the Bush administration had made some bad decisions in Iraq and was unprepared for stabilising the country.
The rare admission of mistakes came during her confirmation hearing at the US Senate Foreign Relations committee where she was approved by a 16-to-2 vote as the first black woman to become the top US diplomat despite Democrats' criticism over the Iraq war.
Democrats on the committee complained the Bush administration was unwilling to learn from its mistakes to change policies in Iraq, be candid about the cost of continued deployment and develop a better exit strategy.
"We have made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been good, some of them have not been good, some of them have been bad decisions, I am sure," Ms Rice told the committee.
The 50-year-old former Stanford University provost did not specify what the bad decisions were but said in at least one case: "We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity, to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind."