Clinton-Gore administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright led the Washington Times front page Friday with an interview in which, among other things, she slams the wisdom of touting a “date certain” for pulling U.S. troops from Iraq.

In support of her opposition, Albright says “In Bosnia, we gave a date certain, and then we couldn’t get out and that undercut our credibility.”

Why is this PG-relevant? Well, in Kyoto we said we’d do something that our Senate had already said we couldn’t do and that stunt — I presume that, over this, there is little debate — ended up hurting our credibility. Neither that administration nor the current one asked the Senate to ratify the promise. The Senate has every ability to vote on signed treaties (see Art. I Sec. 5, Art. II Sec. 2) but has had no interest in forcing the matter.

When it comes to actions by the executive, you can claim all you want the talking points that Bush refused to sign Kyoto (he couldn’t sign it), or withdrew from Kyoto (he couldn’t, the Senate never ratified it, and he surely never unsigned it, which is the one thing he could have done in the negative); ultimately you’d have to admit that Bush’s rhetoric was all that changed and he merely continued the Clinton-Gore policy of declining to pursue ratification unless and until China, India, and the like signed on to similar promises.

That reflected one of two Byrd-Hagel conditions. That this policy was announced by Al Gore after agreeing to the treaty — which was particularly bizarre given how the pact he’d just agreed to on our behalf exempted those countries in its terms, an exemption to which they too had just agreed. (As a reminder, typically things such as a treaty’s terms are negotiated before the agreement stage, not after you accept them.)

As the world gears up for a party (December 1-13) in Poznan, Poland designed to celebrate the removal of the obstruction to global climate nirvana, George W. Bush, it is instructive to recall the folly of making promises that we aren’t about to keep. In Poznan in six weeks or so we will be asked (told?) to prepare to promise a reduction of GHGs of a quarter to a third from current levels in a decade. The year 2020 or 2025 is going to be the end-point for Kyoto II, period (assuming the EU can find some way to formally make a promise, in the face of Member States refusing individual quotas). The biggest, baddest, least likely piece of legislation out there, the Dingell-Boucher draft, while far-fetched in its object and design, is nonetheless far less ambitious over any near-ish-term horizon that might concern a politician today.

So think about this in the giddy early days of December and particularly the post-Poznan, pre-Copenhagen period commencing in January. And here is one other reminder: we are the only country that can have the terms of such a pact, non-binding on its face, enforced against us domestically by our own courts.

Just words? Nope. They have consequences.