The United States reached a sad milestone over the weekend with four more deaths bringing the total of U.S. casualties in Iraq to 4,000. The new casualty total nearly coincides with another important milestone — the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, which came last week.

Unfortunately, coverage of the war in Iraq has declined precipitously, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet,” Richard Perez-Pena writes in today’s New York Times. “Iraq accounted for 18 percent of [broadcast television networks] prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year,” Perez-Pena notes, citing figures from PEJ.

Iraq also seems to have disappeared from coverage of the presidential campaign, which these days is filled with talk of Barack Obama’s relationship with his pastor and the typical ‘horse race’ coverage, focused on whether Hillary Clinton can catch up in pledged delegates or the popular vote.

But last week, the senator from New York gave what her handlers called “a major policy address on the war in Iraq.” In Hillary’s March 17 speech on Iraq, she denounced “the decision to rush to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their work or waiting for diplomacy to run its course,” but there is absolutely no admission that her vote endorsed that rush to war.

Certainly, George W. Bush must bear primary responsibility for the disastrous war in Iraq — along with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the neoconservatives who pushed for that war.

But Democrats and Republicans in Congress — including, most prominently, Hillary Clinton and John McCain — who voted for the war must also bear at least partial responsibility for it. The putative Republican nominee has said that the United States military could stay in Iraq for “maybe a hundred years” and that “would be fine with me.” But it would not be fine with the American people, who overwhelmingly support withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq: 59% of Americans would like to see U.S. troops brought home from Iraq within a year, according to Rasmussen Reports. And of course, among Democratic primary voters, that figure is still higher.

No wonder, then, that the senator from New York is running away from her record of supporting the Iraq war. As Frank Rich put it, “Every time she opens her mouth about Iraq, she reminds voters of how she enabled the catastrophe that has devoured American lives and treasure for five years,” and “On Monday she once again pretended her own record didn’t exist while misrepresenting her opponent’s.” Asks Rich, “What if Mrs. Clinton had come clean Monday, admitting that she had made a mistake in her original vote and highlighting her efforts to make amends since?”

The answer, I think, is because Hillary Clinton is much more like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney than she would be willing to admit. Like Bush and Cheney, Hillary will never admit having made a mistake, which she seems to view as a sign of weakness; and so she has to ’spin’ her vote as having been the result of the administration’s attempts to manipulate and deceive members of Congress. But do we really want a president who is that susceptible to manipulation and deceit?

As every member of the Senate knew at the time, the truth was that the vote was a vote for war against Iraq. Hillary Clinton knew that she was voting for a de facto declaration of war when she cast that vote, and not simply — as she tries to insinuate — a vote to authorize more diplomacy. “No one believes this spin for the simple reason that no one believes Mrs. Clinton is an idiot,” Rich writes. “Her patently bogus explanations for her vote have in the end done far more damage to her credibility than the vote itself.” But, as Rich notes, “That she has never given a forthright speech on Iraq is what can happen when your chief campaign strategist is a pollster.”

Five years ago this month, Senate Democrats were under intense pressure to go along with the drive to war, with the implicit threat that they would be targeted for defeat as being weak on defense if they did not cast their vote for the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.” To their credit, nearly half the Democrats in the Senate voted against the war. Being in the Illinois State Senate at the time, Barack Obama was not confronted with such a vote; but he publicly spoke out against the impending war at a time when it was politically risky to do so. Presciently, Obama declared that the invasion of Iraq would produce “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences.” In contrast, Hillary Clinton cast her vote for war and enthusiastically supported the Bush administration in the most disastrous foreign policy initiative in U.S. history.

The Democratic presidential nomination has now come down to just two candidates. One demonstrated both good judgment and true courage. The other showed bad judgment and cowardice. That is the choice facing voters in the remaining primaries from Pennsylvania to South Dakota. The stakes for our country could hardly be higher.