Ms Conoleeza Rice has been formally approved as the new US Secretary of State.
The approval follows her appearance before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee during which she accepted the Bush administration made some bad decisions in Iraq and was unprepared for stabilizing the country in a rare acknowledgment of mistakes.
Democrats complained the Republican President George W. Bush's administration was unwilling to learn from its mistakes to change policies in Iraq, be candid about the cost of continued deployment and develop a better exit strategy.
"We have made a lot of decisions in this period of time. Some of them have been good, some of them have not been good, some of them have been bad decisions, I am sure," Ms Rice told the committee.
"We didn't have the right skills, the right capacity, to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind," she said on the second day of hearings on her confirmation.
Her nomination was easily approved by the committee.
The full Senate is expected to confirm her as the first black woman Secretary of State tomorrow, the day of President George W. Bush's inauguration for a second four-year term.
Mr Bush has chosen the 50-year-old former Stanford University provost to replace Mr Colin Powell, widely admired abroad and often seen as the Cabinet's lone dove stressing diplomacy to solve crises.
Ms Rice 's acknowledgment of mistakes followed criticism her testimony yesterday belied the reality on the ground, where a raging insurgency has repeatedly delayed the training of Iraqi forces who would eventually take over from US troops.
Ms Rice declined to predict for senators when US forces would return home but asserted there had been progress in training Iraqis to eventually replace the 150,000 American troops.