The Wizards Of "Is'.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Politics: Sen. Hillary Clinton now says that if she knew then what she knows now she wouldn't have voted to liberate Iraq while reminding constituents and contributors that she was for the war before she was against it.

Echoing her husband's strategy of "triangulation," designed to grab the center while painting Republicans to the right and Democrats to the left as extremists, Mrs. Clinton recently sent out a 1,600-word letter in which she said: "If Congress had been asked (to authorize the war) based on what we know now, we never would have agreed."

But based on what he knew then, President Bill Clinton, with Hillary at his side, signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. The policy of the U.S., it stated, should be "to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."

Funny, that sounds exactly like what President Bush is doing.

Citing "assurances they (the Bush administration) gave that they would first seek to resolve the issue peacefully through United Nations-sponsored inspections," Mrs. Clinton lamented: "Their assurances turned out to be empty ones."

Amnesia is clearly part of the triangulation concept. Are these the same inspectors whom Saddam kicked out of Iraq in 1998, months before her husband launched airstrikes against Iraq designed to take out Saddam's WMD facilities? If Hillary now claims she was also "misled," then who misled her husband?

In December 1998, Mr. Clinton said: "Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference; he has used them. The international ...