It Shouldn't Need Saying...

But apparently it needs to be said, and Daniel Larison at The American Conservative makes it plain enough for any dope to see:

The U.S. Lost the Iraq War

Pete Wehner writes a typically delusional response to a recent George Will column:

On Iraq, he’s simply wrong. Because of the success of the surge, the Iraq war–unlike, say, the Vietnam War–was won [bold mine-DL].

This is just pitiful. Bush loyalists will believe whatever they want to believe, but their self-serving spin has to be rejected for what it is. The Iraq war may not have been “the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history,” as Will claimed, but it ranks among the four or five worst blunders in the annals of the United States. It was an unnecessary war, it had nothing to do with securing the U.S. or its allies, and it has manifestly made the region less stable and secure than it was before the invasion. The U.S. paid an appalling price in thousands of lost lives, tens of thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars wasted on a fool’s errand to “disarm” a government that had been disarmed years earlier. American soldiers were sacrificed year after year in the name of creating a democratic government in Iraq only to usher in a sectarian, semi-authoritarian regime whose abusive misrule helped to create the current conflict. Along the way, millions of Iraqis were displaced internally or forced into exile, over a hundred thousand died, and most of the rest have been living in a failed state for more than ten years.

It is one of the great indictments against our political system and our citizenry that almost no thought or pity has been expended on those millions of Iraqis whose lives have been ruined, blighted, or destroyed by a U.S. invasion intended to show the Mideast who was boss, when it turned out that sure as f-uck wasn't us; but even today there's more Beltway concern and trumpet soloing over our "standing" in the world, the size of our Victor Davis Hanson manhood, than the reckless resolve and puffed-up hubris that resulted in such an ongoing debacle--a debacle that was a neverending moral wrong. George Bush's post-presidential foray into painting isn't going to paper over the bloody mural that is his legacy. Larison:

Bush will never own up to his responsibility for this disaster, and apparently neither will many of his supporters. That is their failure. No one else has to share in it.

Of course, the reason Bush loyalists claim that the Iraq war was "won" is so that they can blame Obama for losing it...for betraying the achievements of the surge. Because God forbid they should ever look inward.