The Daily Beast is reporting that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged President Barack Obama to keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq past 2011.

“Hillary Clinton was a lion for keeping troops there,” James Jeffrey, who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2011, told The Daily Beast in an interview. “She was a strong advocate for keeping troops there past 2011,” when American forces eventually withdrew.

By contrast, in her media blitz promoting her book, Clinton seemed to suggest that she agreed with the President’s timetable and put the blame on the Iraqi government.

I was involved in a lot of the efforts to come up with what our offer would be. And we made such an offer to then Prime Minister Maliki. And he would not accept the status of forces agreement.

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Some now say, well, you should have made him or you should have — but that’s not the way it works. You have to — if you’re going to having American troops in harm’s way — and we knew Iraq would be quite dangerous for a long time, unpredictable, at the very least — you have to have the host government, in this case Iraq, say, OK, here’s what we want. We’re signing this agreement which will protect American soldiers.

We didn’t get that done. And I think, in retrospect, that was a mistake by the Iraqi government.

The Daily Beast notes Clinton will continue to have to address her Iraq policy if she does, in fact, decide to run for President in 2016.

If she runs for president, Clinton will have several questions to answer about her stewardship of the Iraq portfolio. The State Department led a reconstruction program that squandered billions of American taxpayer dollars on misguided and poorly implemented projects. The U.S. Embassy and its support staff grew to gargantuan proportions, only to be “right-sized” later on. U.S. consulates were built and then abandoned. State Department training of the Iraqi police forces was a disaster.

But the main question Clinton does not answer in her book and has not directly addressed yet is, if she had been successful in her drive to keep American troops in Iraq, would that have made the difference? The White House didn’t believe it would.