Allison makes a good point about why Hillary can’t disavow her Iraq vote. Mickey Kaus thinks that Hillary has managed to end up with what he regards as the worst possible stance:
It’s not too early to say that Hillary’s performance in the opening weeks has been impressively unimpressive. It’s pretty clear in retrospect, that the war with Iraq, however it comes out, was a bad gamble. A mistake, in other words. But now that we’ve made the mistaken gamble, it also seems clear–to Mohammed at least–that the surge might do some good. The correct position, by these lights, was War No, Surge Yes. It would be selfishly callous, in a stereotypically American way, for us to invade Iraq, make a mess, and then not be willing to pay any extra price to help fix the mess we’ve made. (Murtha’s demand that the troops be given “a year at home”–and the heck with what happens to Iraqis like Mohammed–only emphasizes this self-interested perspective.)
Yet through a conscientiously applied mixture of high-minded comity, Machiavellian calculation, stubbornness and bad expert advice, Hillary has managed to arrive at a position that’s precisely wrong on both counts: War Yes, Surge No.