This, in a nutshell, is why I think Hillary is the most responsible candidate in the Democratic field. It’s a Washington Post bit on her peregrinations on Iraq, all of which fairly scream to me, “I know I might be president, and I’m not going to lock myself into silly and unworkable promises just to please the mob on Iraq”:

Hillary Clinton’s promises to get the United States out of Iraq and to bring U.S. troops home on a definite timetable are great applause lines. But they are also misleading. An examination of the fine print of Clinton’s positions on Iraq shows that they are carefully hedged and could permit her to keep troops there through two presidential terms. According to Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer, Clinton “will” begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq within 60 days of her inauguration. (Clinton herself has been a little more circumspect, using words such as “hope” and “plan.”) But the Democratic front-runner has set no end date for the withdrawal. The most she will say is that she envisions “a vastly reduced residual force to remain for some limited period of time.” Clinton has not been specific on the number of troops she would withdraw or when she would withdraw them. She has refused to promise that all troops would be out by the end of her first presidential term, in January 2013. She has said that several brigades of combat troops would have to remain in Iraq for a variety of missions, including: –Denying a staging ground to al-Qaeda. –Supporting Iraqis in Anbar province and Kurds in the north. –Countering Iranian influence. –Protecting the U.S. Embassy and other U.S. interests. –Training Iraqi security forces. Clinton is trying to have it both ways. Her bold “I will end the war” promise is an obvious exaggeration. A truer description of her position might be “I will do my best to end a war that I now believe to have been deeply mistaken, but the United States has many interests in the Middle East that must be protected.”

Is this kind of positioning very admirable? No. It’d be better to be frank. Does Hillary do too much of this crafty positioning on nearly everything? Sure. But I don’t conclude from this, as Peggy Noonan did last week, that Hillary’s “toughness seems to have no purpose beyond personal accrual of power.” She’s very clearly a liberal who wants to win, and if she does, will push left-wing positions to the extent practical.