Hillary Clinton today portrays her stance on Iraq as being the same as President Obama’s. But when she was Secretary of State, she pushed hard for keeping troops in Iraq — despite the fact that the White House was looking to bring all the troops home.

“Hillary Clinton was a lion for keeping troops there,” James Jeffrey, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in 2011, told The Daily Beast in an interview. “She was a strong advocate for keeping troops there past 2011,” when American forces eventually withdrew.

At a CNN Town Hall Tuesday, Clinton unveiled what is now her official accounting of what happened in 2011, when the Obama administration was negotiating to keep troops in Iraq with the government of Nouri al-Maliki. Clinton placed the blame for the failure of the negotiations on Maliki. She said the administration had offered him a Status of Forces Agreement with American troops, attached but he didn’t accept.