I have written constantly about his saying JUST THAT.

In effect, this seems to lift some of the blame for the war from the Bush administration and place it on the backs of Democrats, an unlikely tack in a Democratic primary. "There are those who offer up easy answers. They will assert that Iraq is George Bush's war, it's all his fault. Or that Iraq was botched by the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney," Obama said in Coralville. "The hard truth is that the war in Iraq is not about a catalogue of many mistakes -- it is about one big mistake. The war in Iraq should never have been fought."

Obama offered a similar argument two days later at a Boys and Girls Club in Waterloo, saying that the country was "failed by a president who didn't tell the whole truth" but that it was "also failed" by the rest of the D.C. establishment. But the crowd broke into such loud applause after his charge against Bush that his broader criticism of the Washington system sounded like an afterthought. Similarly, those moments on the trail when he allows himself to take clear shots at Bush -- on issues such as torture, military contractors and education funding -- tend to win him his loudest cheers.

Gist:

And especially Richard Holbrooke, who is going to be probably the next secretary of state under a Clinton government. It's very important to remember that Richard Holbrooke, when he was assistant secretary of state for East Asia, he was propping up Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines when he was alive, and also dictator Suharto in Indonesia in terms of repression of East Timor. Richard Holbrooke is kind of a hawk, actually. He says that Iran is a threat, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler, which would easily put him in the neocon column for that matter. Basically, most of the Clinton advisers were pro-war on Iraq, while Obama's advisers, most of them were against.

 They have also included some of the more enlightened and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. His team also includes the noted human rights scholar and international law advocate Samantha Power - author of a recent New Yorker article on U.S. manipulation of the UN in post-invasion Iraq - and other liberal academics.

The well-publicized contrast between Hillary Clinton's early backing of the Bush administration's war effort and Barack Obama's early opposition, has to a degree been replicated in the less visible network of foreign policy advisers that each candidate has cultivated -- the early war opponents by Obama, and the one-time hawks by Clinton.

The differing histories of the candidates on Iraq, reinforced by the parallel commitments of their advisers, suggests - but does not guarantee - that Clinton and Obama would, if elected, adopt substantially dissimilar approaches to international relations and to national security threats. If the past and the advisers are a guide, then Clinton would be expected to adopt a tougher line, and would be likely to threaten, and perhaps use, force more readily than Obama.

You are too funny.

"she is also dispassionate, disappointed, and amused by his divisive methods and dogmatic ideology."