Wall Street Journal
by Peggy Noonan
March 25, 2013

The air has been full of 10th-anniversary Iraq war retrospectives. One that caught my eye was a smart piece by Tom Curry, national affairs writer for NBC News, who wrote of one element of the story, the war's impact on the Republican Party: "The conflict not only transformed" the GOP, "but all of American politics."

It has, but it's an unfinished transformation.

(excerpted)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...?mod=hp_opinion

When I first read that title "Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?", I thought - what recover? It was arguably the right thing to do and why should that destroy the R party?

And, of course, it could have been the right thing to do, had it succeeded, and both sides would have claimed some of the success. Its failure falls solely on the republicans. And, the fact that it failed was either deliberate or a result of the ineptitude of the 0 administration, but, either way, directly caused by 0 and crew.

I don't know that we'll ever be able to proof that it was deliberate, but it sure can and is being used to make the republicans look bad.

Quote: Sanguine wrote in post #2

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When I first read that title "Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?", I thought - what recover? It was arguably the right thing to do and why should that destroy the R party?

And, of course, it could have been the right thing to do, had it succeeded, and both sides would have claimed some of the success. Its failure falls solely on the republicans. And, the fact that it failed was either deliberate or a result of the ineptitude of the 0 administration, but, either way, directly caused by 0 and crew.

I don't know that we'll ever be able to proof that it was deliberate, but it sure can and is being used to make the republicans look bad.

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