Silky wants to score a bank shot on Hillary Clinton over the NIE. You know, that thing that Mike Huckabee hadn’t heard of until yesterday.

Senator Hillary Clinton of New York yesterday defended her approach on Iran as appropriately aggressive diplomacy, saying she was not advocating a “rush to war” by her Senate vote declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.
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But she faced criticism from her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination during a two-hour debate hosted by National Public Radio and Iowa Public Radio, one day after a report by federal intelligence agencies that Iran stopped trying to develop nuclear weapons in 2003.

“Among the Democratic candidates, there’s only one that voted for this resolution. And this is exactly what [President] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney wanted,” former North Carolina senator John Edwards said of Clinton at the debate in Iowa, the site of the nation’s first presidential caucuses, Jan. 3. “Senator Clinton has said she agrees with George Bush terminology that we’re in a global war on terror, then she voted to declare the military group in Iran a terrorist organization. What possible conclusion can you reach other than that we are at war?” Edwards added.

Uh, John, we are at war. Have been since 2001. Google it.

Edwards’ foreign policy is, essentially, Jacques Chirac’s: Figure out what the American administration is doing and then just do the opposite.

Edwards huffing authoritatively on the NIE this time around is somewhat ironic. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Edwards was not among the paltry 6 senators who read the 2002 NIE that laid out the evidence against Saddam Hussein.

Fwiw, the Senate’s vote to designate Iran’s Qods force a terrorist group obviously did not lead directly to open war with Iran. But it might have helped persuade Iran that the US is aware of Iran’s activities in Iraq and is fed up with them. The amendment that Clinton and a majority of the Senate voted for mainly lays out the case that the Qods force has been meddling and killing our troops in Iraq, which happens to be the truth.

Update: Someone over at Cowardly Political Musings insists that we’re not at war with Iran. Well, they’re certainly at war with us. See here and here and here and here, for starters.