It was an admirable gesture for Senator Clinton to visit our troops in Iraq on Friday, but she would have done better to remember the famous saying of the post-World War II Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former isolationist, Arthur Vandenberg, that “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” Vandenberg’s oft-cited axiom was born in a Cold War world, but can be equally applied today in the war against terrorism. If anyone ought to understand the importance of politics ending at the water’s edge, indeed, it would be Mrs. Clinton, who saw her husband’s policies criticized for domestic political reasons during the late 1990s.

In one incident that has come to have resonance in the post-September 11 world, President Clinton issued a series of air strikes in August of 1998 against Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. Mr. Clinton was reacting to the terrorist bombings of America’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks to which Mr. bin Laden had been linked. “Terrorists must have no doubt that, in the face of their threats, America will protect its citizens and will continue to lead the world’s fight for peace, freedom, and security,” Mr. Clinton said at the time, speaking from Martha’s Vineyard. Still, Republican Senators Specter and Coats fetched up with comments implying that the president was engaged in a “Wag the Dog” scenario to distract voters from the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. One can only speculate the effect that this criticism had on Clinton administration policy in the incipient war against terrorism and to what extent it forestalled more aggressive action against Al Qaeda.

It’s worth noting that many Republicans, including Speaker Gingrich, stood with the president. Still, Mr. Clinton, and presumably Mrs. Clinton, got a taste of how destructive it can be to bring the cynicism and division characteristic of democratic politics to the world stage, where a nation needs to speak with one voice. Mrs. Clinton no doubt truly believes that “There are many questions about the [Bush] administration’s policies,” as the Buffalo News quoted her as saying. It would be perfectly appropriate for her to say so on the Senate floor in Washington. But it’s hardly the message that our troops or the Iraqi public need to hear when one of the highest-profile op position politicians in America sets foot on Iraqi soil. Nor is it productive, as the New York Times quoted her, to say that success “will take a big change in our administration’s thinking,” one that doesn’t seem “forthcoming.” Mrs. Clinton, if she wants to take the high road, could show President Bush the respect that some Republicans failed to show Mr. Clinton when it mattered just as much.