US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Monday that the Bush administration fell short of goals it had set for itself but maintained that history would prove it right.

Second:

The war on terror has failed to eliminate Al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, but the US-led coalition and Iraq are close to defeating the group’s Iraq branch, she said.

There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until the United States invaded. Somehow I don’t think this evens out. If you were writing an end-of-the-year performance evaluation and an employee said something like “I didn’t complete my essential task but I came close to fixing a huge error I made that complicated my essential task,” how would you rate that fellow?