Rice to be named Secretary of State after Senate grilling

CONDOLEEZZA RICE was confirmed as US Secretary of State yesterday after undergoing torrid questioning by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Democrats’ failed presidential candidate John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, her chief tormentor during the two-day hearing, were the only senators to vote against her appointment.

Pending approval by the full Senate, Ms Rice will be the first black woman to hold the job and will succeed Colin Powell.

Ms Rice underwent strenuous Democratic assaults on the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq during the hearing.

Democrats, including senior committee member Joseph Biden, had said they were reluctantly voting to elevate Ms Rice to the nation’s top diplomatic job.

A vote by the full Senate, regarded as a formality, was expected today.

As the committee voted, outoging Secretary of State Colin Powell bid farewell to his “family” at the State Department.

“You were my troops, you were America’s troops,” the former army general said. “You are the carriers of America’s values.”

Ms Rice surmounted two days of sometimes contentious questioning on the administration’s prosecution of the Iraq war.

She insisted that Saddam Hussein was a dictator who refused to account for weapons of mass destruction. She added that it was impossible to change the nature of a terror threat in the Middle East with him leading Iraq.

But Ms Boxer would not be shaken off, even after Ms Rice acknowledged that “there were some bad decisions” taken by the Bush administration on Iraq.

She accused Ms Rice of “an unwillingness to give Americans the full story because selling the war was so important to Dr Rice. That was her job.”

More than 1,365 members of the US military have died since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.