Whenever there's an election in Iraq, U.S. triumphalism follows. In a recent column, Peter Wehner, my PoliticsDaily.com colleague, touts George W. Bush's war in Iraq and joins others in the it-hasn't-turned-out-so-bad chorus. But these pronouncements serve as a reminder that it's rather easy to be a freedom fighter with somebody else's blood.
Wehner, who worked in the Bush White House, argues that the "dramatic turnaround" in Iraq since 2006 shows that the war was not, as columnist Joe Klein once observed, "probably the biggest foreign policy mistake in American history." He echoes Thomas Friedman that "Bush's gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right." And he quotes former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker: "In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came." This sounds like saying, "All's well that ends well."
