Victor Hanson lays out the particulars and concludes:
For all the scrambling to disown the present policies, the irony is that they are bearing fruit and always had the best chance to end the region's genesis of terror. How sad that those who supported the costly spread of freedom are written off as illiberal, and those who resigned themselves to the easy status quo were seen as wise and sober.
So there we have it: an orphaned policy with a bright future that is being claimed by fewer and fewer — we'll see if that changes when Iraq emerges as a stable democracy.
Truly, opponents of the war seem determined to find any surviving enemy and surrender to him before we hunt them all down and kill them first.