Not since Hillary Clinton kissed Suha Arafat has she committed a foreign policy blunder like the speech she delivered to the Brookings Institution this week singling out for criticism the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi. “I hope this Administration will strongly repudiate the statements recently reported by Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Shalabi, his recent assessment that the faulty intelligence that he helped provide to the United States was, quote, ‘not important.’ On the contrary, the extent that our intelligence services depended on unreliable sources of intelligence, such as defectors steered to us by Shalabi is deadly serious,” Senator Clinton said, according to the transcript of the speech posted on her campaign Web site.

Never mind that Mrs. Clinton and her crack foreign policy aides managed to misspell, in the transcript, both the first and last names of the most important free Iraqi leader, whose name isn’t exactly obscure at this point. Mrs. Clinton took his quotation way out of context. It was from an interview with The Daily Telegraph in which Mr. Chalabi acknowledged errors but also said that there was a heroic aspect to the whole endeavor, because, “That tyrant Saddam is gone.” One would search in vain in Mrs. Clinton’s speech for an acknowledgement of that accomplishment.

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton refers in the speech to the American involvement in Iraq under the Bush administration as a “policy failure.” Tell that to the Iraqis now liberated from the tyranny of Saddam’s regime, with its mass graves holding tens of thousands murdered. Mr. Chalabi, unlike Mrs. Clinton, has his eye on the big picture. He remembers that, during eight years in the White House, Mrs. Clinton’s husband failed to free Iraq. He failed to implement the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. He dealt with Saddam in stead through the United Nations, with missile strikes, and with sanctions that failed to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people.

As for Mrs. Clinton’s point about the prewar intelligence, does anyone doubt that, had America’s intelligence services refused to meet with Iraqi defectors before the war, or had Mr. Chalabi declined to assist America in contacting the defectors, Mrs. Clinton today would be denouncing both Mr. Chalabi and the intelligence services for having failed to pursue all the information available?

No, Mrs. Clinton’s Brookings speech wasn’t really about foreign policy or national security or intelligence policy or even about Iraq; it was about campaign fund-raising and political self-promotion. That is why her campaign committee posted a copy of the speech on its Web site to begin with, and sent news of it, with a link to the speech, around to supporters in an e-mail urging them to “Contribute today!” to “help re-elect Hillary!” As of last night, Mrs. Clinton hadn’t posted a transcript of the speech on her Senate Web site. But she did post it on her campaign Web site.

It’s strange behavior for a senator who claims she wants to work in a bipartisan way and build her credibility on the national security front — strange and disappointing. For we don’t mind saying that we have had some hopes that the experience of courting votes in New York have matured Mrs. Clinton on the matter of foreign policy. Indeed, she seemed to be standing back from the piling-on that has gone on among the Democrats over the war in Iraq, for which Mrs. Clinton voted. Unlike Senator Kerry, she also voted for the $87 billion in supplemental funding for our troops and the work in Iraq. She can only lose by taking cheap shots at a leading member of the transitional leadership we have empowered in Iraq. True leadership would involve halting politics at the water’s edge.