[samtheman]

To me the most important issue here is how should the Republican Presidential Candidates handle this?

Should they emphasize the original mistake of invading in the first place, or the secondary (but much more recent) mistake of turning victory into defeat.

The temptation is to emphasize the latter and heap well-deserved condemnation on Obama for walking away from the victory that was created by the surge and letting Iraq go into free-fall when it could easily have been prevented.

But I am afraid that is not the best electoral strategy. The American people don’t want to hear about how (maybe) we should return to Iraq. As much as it might seem irrelevant now, I think on this issue it’s more prudent to say something along the lines of “President Bush didn’t fail because of faulty WMD estimates, he failed because of faulty understanding of the structure of power in that part of the world, and how necessary a strong-man in Iraq was for maintaining regional stability”.

[Alberta's Child]

If the most important issue is how the GOP presidential candidates handle this, then it's critical for everyone to remember this:

"It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq." -- Dick Cheney, U.S. Secretary of Defense, April 15, 1994

This is compelling evidence that the U.S. government embarked on an invasion of Iraq in 2003 that it knew damn well was going to end in disaster. Any Republican candidate who refuses to disown his predecessors in office ought to just pack it in and stay home.

The Republican candidate who calls on everyone who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to be executed for treason and hung upside down from the Washington Monument (and this would include both Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton) may win the 2016 election in a monumental landslide.

[VerySadAmerican]

There was a time when the USA understood it was “necessary a strong-man in Iraq was for maintaining regional stability”. That’s why we put Saddam in power.