Each of Clinton’s missteps leading up to the vote provide material for a proper apology. She could have apologized for not voting for the Levin Amendment. She could have apologized for not taking the time to read the long-version NIE. She could even have apologized for not keeping the faith with the U.N. inspectors. Instead, as the Bush administration began its invasion, Clinton, insisting against contrary evidence from weapons inspectors that Iraq continued to be “in material breach of the relevant United Nations resolutions,” called for giving Bush’s “firm leadership and decisive action” in waging “the ongoing Global War on Terrorism” America’s “unequivocal support.” If Clinton’s pre-vote rhetorical hand-wringing on the Senate floor had been over avoiding military conflict while there was still a chance for a peaceful inspection process, her trepidation seems to have vanished once the invasion began. She didn’t display the demeanor of someone mourning a failed peace, or one whose trust in her commander-in-chief had been violated.

Taking Clinton at her word that she really did believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that Saddam was still harboring WMDs in 2002, it became evident pretty soon after the invasion that there was no smoking gun. So why didn’t she apologize in 2004? In 2006? How about when she ran for president in 2008? Why wait 12 years to offer an apology based on facts that hadn’t changed over the previous decade? In fact, the only major shifts between Clinton’s vote and her newfound contrition were the failure of America’s nation-building project in Iraq and the overwhelming sway of public opinion against the war. It’s a set of circumstances that leave only a few disheartening interpretations of Clinton’s behavior. In one, she shifted her own rhetoric out of expediency. In another, she agreed with the basic tenets of Bush’s nation-building program, but believed he botched the follow-through. But she doesn’t refer to either in her vague expression of regret in Hard Choices.

Like many of the issues of the Iraq War itself, what Clinton might have specifically gotten wrong hangs in the air, unexamined and unexplored. Her mea culpas never address her failures on a granular level. Her apologies never hint at a transformative lesson that fundamentally altered her ideas of organized state violence.

As Daniel Larison has pointed out, “In almost every case for the last twenty years, Clinton has reliably sided with those favoring more rather than less aggressive measures in response to foreign conflicts and crises.” This was as true during her husband’s administration (when she “urged him” to bomb Kosovo) as it was during her tenure as secretary of state and as a candidate for president. And it’s also why accusations that Clinton voted in favor of the war resolution out of political expediency, or that she was putting “politics before principle,” ring hollow. If anything, her vote suggested continuity with an interventionist foreign-policy vision that she remained faithful to long after it had lost its political currency.