Hillary Is In, Where Does She Stand on the War?

From Senator Clinton's interview on Jan. 18 with Gwen Ifill

I think that certainly our [current] strategy has not succeeded, and I don't think there's any doubt about that anywhere, including in the White House.

The question is, what do we do now going forward? And the president's proposal to add 21,500 troops in an escalation of the combat situation is not going to work.

In the absence of a comprehensive approach that tries to put some pressure on the Maliki government to do the kinds of actions, to create some political resolution, to deal with the oil revenues, to reverse the de-Baathification, all of that has to be done, and so far there have been no consequences extracted from this government.

They get open-ended commitments from the Bush administration. You know, for more than a year-and-a-half, I've been in favor of phased redeployment of our troops, bringing them home as quickly as possible, but based on a comprehensive strategy that looked at the diplomatic, political, and economic challenges and, frankly, exerted some leverage on the Iraqis who have to take these actions if any possible salvage can be made of this situation.

"Look, we have to cap the number of American troops, make it very clear we're not putting more American troops into this sectarian war."

We, instead, are going to set forth one last time the actions we expect from the Maliki government and, instead of cutting funding for American troops, which I do not support, because still to this day we don't have all of the equipment, the armored Humvees and the rest that our troops need, instead of cutting funding to American troops, cut the funding to the Iraqi forces and to the security forces, often private contractors that we pay for to protect the members of this government.

We have to do something to get their attention, in order to force them to deal with the political, and the economic, and the diplomatic pieces of the puzzle that confronts us.

If you listen to what Prime Minister Maliki said, as you recounted, they want us to equip and provide the resources and firepower to the Iraqi forces.

I say no. That will be a mistake, because that will certainly produce a reaction from regional powers that are not going to sit idly by and see the sectarian forces, represented by the various Shia factions, be able -- with our help -- to go after the Sunnis.

They will feel compelled to up their support for the Sunni insurgents in order to defend themselves. So I think we have to make it clear to the Maliki government, we do not have a blank check with an open commitment here.

I think this administration is also focused on Iran. And I think we need to send a very strong message that an administration with its track record of failure, of arrogance, of refusal to listen and learn from the disastrous steps that have, unfortunately, been taken should not be rushing off and putting American servicemembers in harm's way and possibly widening the conflict.

So there's a lot that we have to worry about.