Meanwhile, just as Barack Obama’s more centrist economic advisors are telling people he wouldn’t really withdraw from NAFTA, it seems that Hillary Clinton’s more hawkish advisors are telling people she won’t really withdraw from Iraq. It’s hard to know what the truth is here. From 2002-2006 or so, Clinton went out of her way to cultivate an image as a hawk, forging relationships with the Michael O’Hanlons and Kenneth Pollacks of the world, hanging out at Peter Beinart’s book party, getting herself labeled one of Jeffrey Goldberg’s “national security Democrats,” having Richard Holbrooke brag to reporters that “She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband,” and so forth.

More recently, she’s talked a lot about ending cowboy diplomacy and ending the war in Iraq. If she becomes the nominee, will we start hearing again about how beating the drums of war with Iran is the way to shift into “general election mode, when she must guard against critics from the right”?

Reacting to the news that the U.S. government has been supplying arms to the Palestinian Authority (so they can fight Hamas), the Armchair Generalist wonders “why is it that the Bush administration’s first answer to every regional conflict is to throw more weapons into the mix? You’d think that, by now, they’d have figured out that hard power doesn’t solve these long-term conflicts.”

I think they actually do understand this pretty well. After all, if the conflicts were “solved” that would reduce the need for American weapons, and htus reduce the opportunities for American influence. The essence of the approach is to create a series of standoffs where our proxies have the bulk of the guns, but their enemies of the bulk of the legitimacy (in part because they’re not serving as our proxy), and thus the guns-without-legitimacy side is able to maintain a permanently tenuous grasp on power that leaves them ever-more-dependent on external American support. The identity or background of the proxy doesn’t really matter, and can include ex-insurgents in Iraq, the same Fatah groups we were trying to freeze out of Palestinian politics a few years ago, Iranian-backed Shiite parties in Basra, sundry Somali factions, whatever.

Experience in action. Watch in amazement as Hillary Clinton specifically cites her experience as First Lady as confirming her view that Saddam Hussein has links with al-Qaeda and active chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs (and no she didn’t read the classified intelligence that might have cast some doubts on her Bush administration talking points) that we had to address through war:

I, for one, look forward to a general election campaign in which every time Clinton starts making a persuasive critique of the Bush-McCain approach to world affairs she winds up getting tagged as a flip-flopper. It’s time to get our heads out of the sand and have a Democratic Party that can make a clean break from this nonsense.