Rice defends her integrity as hearing turns testy

Rice, whose confirmation as the first black woman secretary of state is all but assured, vowed to press diplomacy to repair ties frayed by the war and argued that the White House sent enough troops to occupy Iraq despite the raging insurgency.

In a heated exchange, California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer argued that the Bush administration had shifted its justification for the war because it had failed to find stocks of biological and chemical weapons it had asserted were there. ‘‘You sent them in there because of weapons of mass destruction. Later, the mission changed when there were none,’’ Boxer told Rice. ‘‘Let’s not rewrite history, it’s too soon to do that.’’

‘‘It wasn’t just weapons of mass destruction,’’ Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein supported terrorism, attacked Kuwait and Israel and needed to be removed, given the new US threat perception after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. —Reuters