Breaking news: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to confirm Condi Rice as Secretary of State. The vote was 16-2. The no votes were cast by senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry.

If you haven’t seen Boxer v. Rice: The Video, be sure to click here and enjoy. Or, if you’re having trouble with the video link, here is a transcript. Then come back here for a commentary roundup.

In her response to Senator Boxer, Rice said the Iraq invasion was justified. “But it wasn’t just weapons of mass destruction. He was also a place — his territory was a place where terrorists were welcomed, where he paid suicide bombers to bomb Israel, where he had used Scuds against Israel in the past.”

His territory was a place where terrorists were welcomed. Saddam Hussein, like many Saudis and others throughout the Middle East, supported Palestinian terrorists who were a danger to Israel. However, currently the only terrorist who was in Iraq prior to the invasion and known to have been connected to anti-American terrorism, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was operating in Iraqi Kurdistan, a territory in Iraq but with some autonomy from the Hussein regime. Saddam Hussein himself has yet to be directly connected to anti-American terrorists.

Where he paid suicide bombers to bomb Israel, where he had used Scuds against Israel in the past. We went to war to protect Israel? Our soldiers are dying to protect somebody else’s country?

Rice also said that Hussein had been a “strategic threat” to the region. However, I well remember that other nations in the Middle East (except Israel) were initially opposed to the invasion.

Juan Cole, Informed Comment for January 19 (permalink missing, sorry), says that thanks to the invasion, Iraq is now a bigger stragegic threat to the region.

I was alarmed at how doctrinaire all her answers were, and how she consistently refused to take any responsibility for misleading the American public into an unnecessary war. Her notion that the US cannot afford to let failed states fester is something that could be debated. But Iraq was not a failed state in 2002. If anything Condi Rice has helped turn Iraq into a failed state. If it is undesirable for the US to let failed states fester, surely it is even more undesirable for the US to use false pretences to turn countries into failed states. She either doesn’t get it, or doesn’t have the elemental courage and integrity to admit that she was wrong. Her deputy Stephen Hadley, by the way, was the one who over-ruled the CIA and authorized the phrase about Iraq buying uranium from Niger in the 2003 State of the Union address. Condi is responsible for her subordinates. If you just went through and made a quotation table of everything she said about Iraq in the first term, it would be hilarious to read now.

I don’t have a quotation table of everything Condi said about Iraq in the first term, but this page is a fun read.

Juan Cole also said,

In the US, Dr. Condaleeza Rice appeared before the Senate in confirmation hearings on her nomination by Bush to be Secretary of State. I was struck by how much tougher The LA Times was in its coverage than most other news outlets. It notes, e.g., that Dr. Rice seemed unwilling to condemn torture unreservedly (her people back in Birmingham must be proud of that one). …

The one thing I disagree with the LA Times piece about is that they say she might be more effective because she is closer to Bush than Powell was. Not so. Her lack of political and intellectual independence from Bush will turn her into a mere parrot, and all the heavy duty decisions will be taken by Donald Rumsfeld and his Neoconservative phalanx. Her testimony, which sounded as though she had been stuck in a time warp for the past three years and hadn’t noticed the disaster in Iraq, was a good sign of her future irrelevance and current inability to deal with reality. The piece of fear mongering she did about the small weak country of Syria was the most alarming thing I heard. She is in no position to rattle sabers at this point. Those bombs in Baghdad on Wednesday weren’t set from Damascus. They were local munitions, local military expertise, local Iraqi guerrillas. And, besides, threatening Syria too vehemently could easily backfire. If they start to fear Condi intends to overthrow them, the Syrian Baath will only have more incentive to support the guerrillas.

In another section of her testimony (you can read the whole bleeping thing here), Rice said,

We will increase our exchanges with the rest of the world. America should make a serious effort to understand other cultures and learn foreign languages. Our interaction with the rest of the world must be a conversation, not a monologue. … we cannot close ourselves off from the rest of the world. If I am confirmed, public diplomacy will be a top priority for me and for the professionals I lead. In all that lies ahead, the primary instrument of American diplomacy will be the Department of State, and the men and women of its Foreign and Civil Services and Foreign Service nationals. The time for diplomacy is now.

Is she saying that the Bushies may abandon their arrogant, unilateral, my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy stance? I’m not holding my breath.

Via Steve Soto on The Left Coaster, see this NBC News story:

Rice said she felt that troop strength going into Iraq was adequate and that �€œwe think the number [of Iraqi forces] right now is somewhere over 120,000.�€�

Biden said he had been to Iraq three times and believed that her estimate was too high. �€œI think you�€™ll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don�€™t think there�€™s more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces,�€� he said.

The discrepancy arose because Rice and Biden were counting different things. While the Defense Department does estimate the Iraqi army at 4,000 strong, the number Biden cited, it estimates all Iraqi forces �€” including the police and the national guard �€” at more than 120,000, the number used by Rice.

I’d very much like a better explanation of that discrepancy, but I haven’t found one. The NBC story continues:

Kerry said every Arab leader he had talked to expressed a willingness to train more Iraqi military but had been rebuffed by the United States. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, he said, had trained only 147 officers and did not understand why his training offers were not being accepted.

Hoo boy, do I wish some real journalists (anybody?) would look into that.