Rice, in Baghdad, Insists That Iraqis Are ‘Making Progress’

PHILIP SHENON

Wearing a helmet and a flak jacket and flanked by machine-gun-toting bodyguards to defend against insurgents, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came here Thursday, insisting that there were new signs of progress in Iraq and that the Bush administration had never sugarcoated its news about the American occupation. "It is a quite critical time for the Iraqi government," Ms. Rice said of the reasons for her brief unannounced visit to the Iraqi capital. "What the American people see on their television screens is the struggle," she said. "It is harder to show the political process that is going on at local levels, at provincial levels and indeed at the national level." Iraqis, she said, are "making progress." (...) Yet signs of progress were not much in evidence in the first hours of her visit. It began inauspiciously when the military transport plane that brought her to Baghdad was forced to circle the city for about 40 minutes because of what a State Department spokesman later said was either mortar fire or rockets at the airport...

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