"You know, if this administration, and its partisans, had just told us from the start...

"Look, we made some mistakes, but they were honest mistakes, and now we're in too deep to just back out and leave our friends in Iraq holding the bag. We need more money, more troops, maybe even a draft, and we still have a chance of sorting this mess out and fulfilling our original mission, to develop a friendly democracy in the middle east as a counterexample to the jihadists and Al-Quaeda and as a counterbalance to Iran and Syria. There is still time to turn this around, while we still have the upper hand." "

Do you need a govt to tell you it's making mistakes- because it's a constant thing you know.
Example, NASA "loses" 4 billion dollars somewhere. I am not talking overspent, I mean lost the money- as in no clue where it went. And I'm NOT saying NASA is particularly bad- it's actually rated by the govt as one of best run govt agencies we have.
Anytime the press wants to do a bit work, they will find shit wrong in the way the govt does things- but unless there is some reason to be interested the press mostly doesn't bother to look.
The press is far more interested in what crazy thing Rosie has said, or a fight between Rosie and Trump, or whatever else doesn't require much thought.
A simple rule is: if you are depending on the mainstream media for useful and significant information- you are utterly clueless on just about every topic.

But, you want me to admit some mistake. I thought it would better to have a smaller military. That was apparently a mistake. 1.4 million is too small. It probably would have been better if we had 1.75 million and were moving towards 2 million.

Happy?

I still think we should have a smaller military, but didn't consider that rest of civilized world would so completely gut their military. Especially when I been brainwashed to think that we made a mistake by not having "the rest of the world" with us militarily- which was a red herring because they simply lacked the military to do this.

"...those of us who originally supported this war might still be willing to give it a chance to succeed, and to work to convince the skeptics to perservere a bit longer. But no, all we got was lies, excuses, evasions, stonewalling, insults, arrogance and even a refusal to alter tactics because it might be interpreted as an admission of incompetence or a concession to criticism. Now the situation has been allowed to deteriorate (yes, allowed!) to the point where it is not physically possible to correct it. We don't have the troops, the money, the materiel, or the domestic or allied support, not to mention the Iraqi support. We ran out of time and we are redlining our war machine."

Twenty years from now, if you say you were a supporter of the war. A person might then ask what you did to support the war?
At that point you might realize that isn't so much that you supported the war, but rather you weren't so stupid as to oppose it and/or be a "peace activist".

"Listen up. The Iraqi people no longer want us there. Our well-intentioned bungling has brought a plague upon their land. They want us out. That is all the reason we need to leave."

All the Iraqi government has to do, is say they want us to leave by some date.
But you being lied to because according to numerous polls the majority of Iraqi people want us to leave- but not right away.

As soon as we can be somewhat sure that Iraqi security can handle their security, we are out of there.