Rice gets the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's nod:

"I'm going to vote for you, but I must tell you it's with a little bit of frustration and some reservation," Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, the committee's ranking Democrat, said today. Mr. Biden said the administration had been less than candid about the problems in Iraq. "Time and again, this administration has tried to leave the American people with the impression that Iraq has well over 100,000 fully trained, fully competent military police and personnel," the senator said. "And that is simply not true. You and I know that. We're months, probably years away from reaching our target goal." Ms. Rice was conciliatory in her reply. "Senator, we've made a lot of decisions in this period of time," she said. "Some of them have been good. Some of them have not been good. Some of them have been bad decisions, I'm sure. I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment, but in how it all adds up." The "no" votes by Senators Boxer and Kerry were no surprise, given their sharp questioning of Ms. Rice on the reasons for going to war against Iraq, the prosecution of the war, and the peacekeeping operations that have caused more American deaths than the war itself. Ms. Boxer assailed the administration anew this morning, asserting that President Bush and his top aides - including Ms. Rice, the national security adviser - had capitalized on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to justify the war in Iraq. "I find it so troubling that the Bush administration used the fear of terror to make the war against Iraq appear to be part of the response to 9/11," Ms. Boxer said. "You were involved in that effort." The senator said Ms. Rice had continued to imply a link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein, when in fact there was none. Her vote against Ms. Rice had nothing to do with her qualifications, the senator said. "It's about candor," Ms. Boxer went on. "It's about telling the full story." Ms. Rice replied evenly, "When you're dealing with intelligence matters you are not dealing with perfect information, and you do have to put that information into a context of someone's history."