The raft of state...

From an article bout Secretary of State Rice's trip to England, 'Tactical Errors' Made In Iraq, Rice Concedes:

...But in response to a question about whether the administration had learned from its mistakes over the past three years, she said officials would be "brain-dead" if they did not recognize where they had erred.

"I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice said. "But when you look back in history, what will be judged is, did you make the right strategic decisions."...

This is so right, so smart, that it makes my head spin to think that brain-dead lefties will probably seize on it as an admission of something being wrong.

• Every big difficult undertaking will involve lots of mistakes.
• Every war America has ever fought started with lots of mistakes.
• Doing anything in this new millennium is likely to include mistakes, because we are all of us groping our way through a trackless and shifting landscape.
• In almost anything you attempt, it is better to get the strategic decisions right, as opposed to the tactical ones. A drunk weaving his way down the right street to get home is better off than an intrepid hiker taking the wrong street.
• In the long run, those who leap into problems and experiment and learn from failures are going to get farther than those masterminds who devise perfect plans to avoid all mistakes. To borrow a metaphor, the first group is like a raft that moves slowly and unglamorously. The second is like a ship that moves with speed. Until it hits a rock. Then it sinks.