So, asked a friend and Hillary Clinton supporter, what's your concern about her?

I'm not sure I can trust her, I said. Not sure I know where she stands. Not sure what she'd do as president.

She's just being pragmatic, said the friend. Clinton learned a lot in her time in the White House - and one of the things she learned was the need to be pragmatic.

I'm not looking for perfection in a candidate for the 2008 race. Liberals who insist on perfection end up helping elect people like George Bush. But Clinton's pragmatism - if that's what it is - has pushed her way, way down on the list of people I might want to see nominated.

There are "small" things, like her support of a bill to outlaw flag-burning. And while I think Clinton does support abortion rights, she has sometimes seemed to waffle. The past couple of years have been no time for waffling on that issue.

Last year, Clinton let conservative publisher Rupert Murdoch host a fundraiser for her. "No doubt Murdoch can raise lots of money," Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote at the time. "That's not the question. The question is: What will it buy?"

Clinton's biggest handicap - until recently - has been her vote to permit President Bush to start the war in Iraq. She has tried to justify that vote by saying she thought it would strengthen his diplomatic position, that she didn't think he would invade Iraq.

Many Americans thought he would, though. And those Americans included thoughtful senators who had seen the same information Clinton had.

One of them was Michigan Senator Carl Levin, who, hours before the vote on the president's Iraq-war resolution, introduced a resolution authorizing war only if the United Nations approved.

Clinton voted against the Levin resolution.

She has bobbed and weaved around that vote as well, but the facts are clear: she had a chance to vote for a resolution embracing multilateralism. And she turned it down.

And then gave George Bush the authority to hurl us into war in Iraq.

Did she do it because she believed Bush was committed to diplomacy and multilateralism? Because she believed there was cause for the invasion? Or because, as some commentators have speculated, she already had her eyes on a run for the presidency and thought that a No vote could get in the way?

It's hard to know which is worse.

No matter. Late last month, she was back at it again, voting in favor of a resolution declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the New York Times' Helene Cooper explained on Sunday, is a group of 125,000 members of Iran's military. Cooper compares the Senate's action to "Iran declaring that the United States military is a terrorist organization because it carries out President Bush's orders."

"They're not a group of voluntary jihadists signing up to fight the United States," an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Cooper. "Many are conscripts taken from the regular army."

And because so many ordinary Iranians have ties to people in the Revolutionary Guard, Iran experts told Cooper, the Senate resolution "runs the risk of further alienating the Iranian population."

Clearly, some members of the Bush administration are pushing for an attack on Iran. The Senate resolution - sponsored by Republican John Kyl of Arizona and one of the Bush administration's strongest allies in the Senate, Democrat-in-name-only Joe Lieberman - is one more carefully calculated step toward that attack.

The administration, wrote Cooper, is in conflict over Iran, and the State Department had been arguing against declaring the Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group. Clinton, however, sided with George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Some Bush critics worry about whether Clinton could be elected, given the vitriol she arouses among many conservatives. I'm worried about that, too. But I'm just as worried about what she would do if she won.