US Secretary of State-designate Ms Condoleezza Rice has defended her integrity and honesty in clashes about Iraq with senators, vowing to press diplomacy to repair ties strained by the war.
Testifying at her US Senate confirmation hearing, Ms Rice was questioned about the number of US troops sent to Iraq, the adequacy of Iraqi forces being trained to replace them and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that were the Bush administration's central justification for the war.
Ms Rice, whose confirmation as the first black woman secretary of state is all but assured in the Republican-led Senate, said she believed the White House sent enough US troops to Iraq despite the raging insurgency that erupted after the invasion.
In a heated exchange in an otherwise generally cordial hearing, California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer argued 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," Ms Boxer told Ms Rice. "Let's not rewrite history, it's too soon to do that."
"It wasn't just weapons of mass destruction," Mr Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying Saddam Hussein supported terrorism, attacked Kuwait and Israel and needed to be removed.
"We can have this discussion in any way that you would like, but I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity," Ms Rice said. "I really hope that you will not imply that I take the truth lightly."
The exchange was the most pointed in a hearing that included disagreements between Rice and Democrats on the numbers of trained Iraqi troops - the linchpin of the US exit strategy - and the numbers of US troops sent to stabilise Iraq.
Ms Rice was President George W. Bush's national security adviser during his first term. Mr Bush has chosen the 50-year-old former Stanford University provost to replace Mr Colin Powell.
Ms Rice said she would seek to rebuild US alliances and to spread freedom around the world - stances met with skepticism by critics who regard the Bush administration's foreign policy as marked by unilateral tendencies.
"We must use American diplomacy to help create a balance of power in the world that favors freedom," Ms Rice said in her opening statement to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington DC today. "And the time for diplomacy is now." Implicitly addressing the criticism the White House pursued its own agenda in Iraq and elsewhere regardless of world sentiment, she said: "Our interaction with the rest of the world must be a conversation, not a monologue."