Rice: Bush is "brain-dead"

Condi Rice today:

The U.S. diplomat met loud anti-war protests in the streets and skeptical questions about U.S. involvement in Iraq at a foreign policy salon Friday, including one about whether Washington had learned from its "mistakes over the past three years."

Rice replied that leaders would be "brain-dead" if they did not absorb the lessons of their times.

"I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice told an audience gathered by the British foreign policy think tank Chatham House.

So who does Bush think should bear the responsibility of learning from one's tactical mistakes?

I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big.

And in a war, there's a lot of -- there's a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made that decision.

Note the similar language between the two in talking about the difference between tactical and strategic decisions: clearly both are referring to precisely the same types of mistakes from which one can learn. There's thus no need to argue as to what type of mistakes should be included, or whether Bush's strategic decisions were themselves flawed; the disagreement plainly refers to the same terms.

In Rice's view as stated, a leader is wrong not to learn from his own mistakes; in Bush's, it's better to stay the course with no regard for one's own mistakes, and let history figure out what could have been done better. And it's tough to disagree that the latter position is a rather brain-dead view of the world.