Now here’s Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who’s already proven himself to be one of the Senate’s best questioners in his brief tenure. “Should there be a residual force in Iraq?” he asks. The Status of Forces Agreement is pretty clear that there shouldn’t be. “We don’t have a strategy unless we can articulate the endpoint” in Afghanistan, he asks adds. Then, he tacks on NATO expansion; negotiating with adversaries like Iran and Burma (!); China; “reconnecting in a real way with east Asia and southeast Asia”; “to show real leadership… with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum”; and then, for good measure, he wants to hear more about re-balancing State-Pentagon tasking.” Does this committee need any other senators?

Where can Clinton begin? “With respect to this re-balancing,” she says, it’s “a much larger issue than just intergovernmental relations,” having to do with “how we see ourselves and how others see us.” If she’s confirmed, we’ll “put a civilian face on our power, and yes we have this great military … but we are much more than that…. [with] assets that we can give to the world.” Clinton makes the good point that the Congressional committees dealing with the military are more powerful and more responsive than those dealing with diplomacy.

She instantiates that with a point about the new military command in Africa, which Clinton supported in the past and continues to support. “We have to be careful,” she says, “that it doesn’t appear that our only face [of involvement] in Africa is our new military command.”