Do not let hindsight lead your thinking here.
At the time, the Senate Majority Leader was assuring us the Iraqi war was lost, Cindy Sheehan was camped out at the Western White House, and Code Pink was assailing Condi Rice with bloody hands. The driveby media was showing nude prisoner pyramids daily as if Bush himself lined them up like that.
Add to this the fact that no one in the Bush administration would defend themselves—we didn’t go toe to toe with the media, the Left and the dems (redundant, I know) and they were able to set the public’s thinking against us.
The democrats won big in 2006 due to this, and had we taken the oil, all Hell would have broken loose.
We were lucky to get the Surge going despite all of the above, and the fact that the Iraqi Sunnis themselves got tired of the fighting.
it’s going to take time to unwind the lies and we need to start now. First one will be to correctly identify the causes of the 2008 meltdown as caused by liberal housing policy. Second will be to correctly identify liberal policy being behind the debt. The wars didn’t help, but they’re small contribitors in the grand scheme of things