Ruh roh. Byron York shows his inner defeatist:
For many of us, the war was supposed to be about U.S. national security and only about U.S. national security. It would be nice if we could make Iraq a better place, just as it would be nice if we could make Afghanistan a better place, but that was never a sufficient reason to go to war. The reason to go to war was to find and kill every last son of a bitch who had anything to do with 9/11. And that job was not the main focus in Iraq, and in any event is unfortunately not finished.
One of the main reasons John McCain is facing such an tough job today is that we are now in the sixth year of a war that the president of his own party started by mistake. That’s a major headwind when you’re running for president; an error of that magnitude will exact a political price. Would anyone be surprised if voters say that they’ve had enough?
Is that the first time someone at the NRO has stated, without mincing words, that the Iraq war was a “mistake?” I thought that only defeatocrats and terrorist enablers felt that way (as well as the majority of the population).
As the right-wing pundits begin to realize what a horrible drag the Iraq War will be on their 2008 electoral chances, expect the rhetoric to continue to shift from “It was the right thing to do all along” to “Of course it was a mistake, everyone agrees it was a mistake by that idiot Bush, no one has ever argued otherwise, but now that we are there we have to WIN! (ponies ponies ponies!).”
Meanwhile, I will leave it to the rocket scientists at the NRO and elsewhere to perform this rhetorical shift all the while attempting to maintain the other rhetorical front in which they must attempt to convincingly argue that the war in Iraq has “made us safer.”
Good luck with that, sophists everywhere.
*** Update ***
Tim IM’s Derbyshire may have also called it a mistake (another reader reminds me Derb was against the war from the beginning, so that doesn’t count).