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ThinkProgress is blasting Sec. Rice for suggesting that she won't be looking back on her mistakes until after she leaves office. Here, for the record, is her quote:

SECRETARY RICE: …As to whether the United States has made mistakes, of course, I’m sure, we have. You can’t be involved in something as big as the liberation of a country like Iraq and all that has happened since, and I’m sure there are things that we could have done differently; but frankly, we are looking ahead. And when I’m back at Stanford University, I can look back and write books about what we might have done differently.

I'm not entirely sure what's gotten them so upset. First off, she's actually admitting to making mistakes. That's something that should be welcomed, no? Second, their specific criticism is that with 140,000 troops deployed in Iraq, they believe she should in fact be spending considerable time looking back on what went wrong in order to figure out what to do next.

But doesn't that have it mostly, if not entirely, backwards? With the region apparently spiraling out of control, shouldn't she be spending most, if not all, of her time trying to figure out what to do next? I understand the whole "you can't know where you are going if you don't know where you've been" thing, but that's not what she was talking about here. In the quote she specifically says that she's not interested in looking at "things that we could have done differently." And for the record, I think she's right to say so.

From the perspective of either what's best for the war or for or soldiers, looking back at once possible but now foreclosed options won't do anyone any good. Yes, of course, doing so might help us prevent this sort of debacle from happening in the future, but for the Secretary of State, that sort of thinking shouldn't really be a priority, should it? In fact, isn't that precisely the sort of thing best left to the days after you've left office?

I'm not one to normally defend Sec. Rice, but that ThinkProgress post really felt like piling on.