There We Go Again

In the latest in a bizarrely long line of efforts to convince us that Hillary Clinton never supported the Iraq War, we've now got her saying "After 9/11, I would never have taken us to war in Iraq. I would have stayed focused on Afghanistan because the real threat was coming from there." Now it's entirely possible that, in a purely counterfactual sense, had some freakish sequence of events put her in the White House in September of 2001 that Hillary Clinton would have stayed focused on Afghanistan rather than drawing attention to Iraq. But in the real world she was a United States Senator, the President of the United States asked for the authority to invade Iraq, and she voted to give it to him.

Clinton has on-again, off-again tried to argue (now she's on again) that that didn't mean she favored actually invading. But it would seem to seriously undermine the argument that she's a doer with tons of valuable experience to argue that she didn't know what was going on. In the real world, it's hardly creditable to think that she was that naive.