I guess I don’t know what else they can really say. But it’s downright pathetic to listen to the Bush administration try to appeal to posterity, as if the decision to invade Iraq will look better in ten, twenty, or a thousand years.

Greeted by antiwar protesters at almost every stop in a tour of a working-class region of England, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that the Bush administration has probably made thousands of “tactical errors” in its handling of the Iraq war. But she defended the invasion as the right strategic decision.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “wasn’t going anywhere without military intervention,” Rice told a crowd of British foreign policy experts in the clubhouse of the local soccer stadium here. 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 had learned from its mistakes over the past three years, she said officials would be “brain-dead” if they did not recognize where 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 cite specific mistakes in Iraq, and State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said she was speaking figuratively. Rice, a former political science professor, frequently tries to place the turbulent years since Sept. 11, 2001, within the scope of history.

“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.

Take it from me Condi, it was a bad decision, and the passage of time is not going to make it look any better…