Conor Friedersdorf has a good article considering the persistence of support for the Iraq war in the GOP (via Andrew). He notes the curious position that Huntsman holds:

Jon Huntsman takes no position — when Michael Brendan Dougherty profiled him for The American Conservative, he searched in vain for contemporaneous accounts of Huntsman’s position on the invasion, and when he asked Huntsman about his position the candidate was reluctant to say that he supported or opposed it at the time (he favors the pullout of American troops).

Given Huntsman’s position on attacking Iran, I don’t think we have to work too hard to imagine what his view about invading Iraq probably was at the time. I judged Huntsman’s non-committal answer on Iraq to be one of the more foolish things he has done during the campaign, and I thought his position on keeping a larger U.S. presence in Iraq to be no better than Pawlenty’s at the time, so I do have to correct Conor on one point. According to Michael’s profile, Huntsman took the same view of withdrawal from Iraq that other Republican candidates have been taking:

Whatever he makes of the original rationale for the Iraq War, Huntsman does believe that the presence of 50,000 U.S. troops “makes it rather difficult for Iran to have a direct shot over to Syria.” It’s an irony. With America having knocked Saddam out, Huntsman concludes that, for now, we must now play the disruptive role he had played in the Shia crescent.

Further, according to Kevin Baron at National Journal, Huntsman offered the boilerplate complaint about withdrawal from Iraq when it was announced:

“President Obama’s decision, however, to not leave a small, focused presence in Iraq is a mistake and the product of his administration’s failures,” Huntsman said in a statement after Obama’s announcement of the Iraq withdrawal. Huntsman omits that it was Iraq’s decision to keep Americans from staying that led to Obama’s withdrawal order, but he says the administration flubbed the diplomacy that should have secured a new deal to keep troops there.

The Iraq litmus test is worse than Conor suggests. It isn’t enough that candidates have to endorse the war or avoid criticizing it, but they are also expected to support an open-ended U.S. presence for the sake of countering Iranian influence that the invasion caused to increase.