Hillary on Iraq

I think David Brooks is very astute in his column today, which lurks behind the Times firewall, about Hillary Clinton’s honorable evolution on the war. I don’t think she has anything to apologize for–but I disagree with Brooks: sooner or later, she’s going to have to admit that her vote to authorize the war was, historically, the wrong thing to do. This is a silly requirement. I think her “If we’d known then what we know now, it never would have come to a vote” is a perfectly adequate explanation. The need for some, in the party’s base, to subject Senator Clinton to a star chamber proceeding about a position she has clearly abandoned seems a self-destructive waste of time and energy. I have real reservations about Clinton as a presidential candidate, but she and Joe Biden are the most knowledgeable Democrats in the field about foreign policy and national security matters. ..and they need to be heard, very carefully, on what should happen next in Iraq, rather than pestered about the past.
I’ll have more to say about Clinton’s and Obama’s Iraq positions later today, in the print edition.