Abe Greenwald complains about things that haven’t happened:

The conservative handwringing on the decade anniversary of the Iraq War has been a little much [bold mine-DL]. Republicans have gone from criticizing Obama’s foreign policy for being too politically pandering to criticizing Bush’s as being insufficiently so.

Greenwald doesn’t identify the conservatives and Republicans he’s criticizing here. That’s understandable, since there has been almost no “conservative handwringing” over the Iraq war. There still haven’t been that many Republicans publicly arguing the war was mistaken or even that it was politically harmful to their party. The few expressions of regret there have been mostly came from conservatives that turned against the war years ago. The tenth anniversary of the start of the war was marked mostly by eerie silence from almost all of its Republican supporters along with the occasional dead-ender celebration thrown in. Remarkably, the supporters with the most to apologize for remain most convinced that they were right, and so have expressed little or no regret over the debacle. Meanwhile, those supporters that had the least to do with making the war happen have been the most overwrought in their public self-flagellation. It’s hard to know whether conservative “handwringing” over the war would be excessive or not, since we have not yet seen any of it.

As far as I can tell, there are hardly any Republicans that criticize Bush explicitly for Iraq or any of his foreign policy failures. Like Iraq, most Republicans treat Bush as a subject that is best avoided in public. They don’t condemn him or praise him. They simply forget about him, and hope that everyone else will, too. One of the main problems with Bush’s foreign policy wasn’t that he failed to “pander” to the public enough, but that he endorsed ill-conceived policies to try to achieve unobtainable goals at exorbitant cost. Bush and his policies became deeply unpopular because of their failure, and they failed because they were deeply flawed from the start. Once the public turned on Bush and the war in Iraq, it’s true that he and his party remained oblivious to the reason for this, which is why most of Bush’s would-be successors in the 2008 and 2012 field carried on as if nothing was wrong with Bush’s foreign policy record. Four years since Bush left office, there still has been no serious attempt to reckon with the failure in Iraq, and based on what we saw last month there doesn’t seem to be any interest in making the effort.