Matthew Dowd, the former chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney '04 presidential campaign, said that it was a mistake America got involved in fighting in Iraq the first time.
June 30, 2014

Matthew Dowd, the former chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney '04 presidential campaign, came out with some real honesty on ABC's This Week Sunday by rebuking the notion that America should get involved in fighting in Iraq ever again. He also admitted that the whole war was a colossal waste of time, money, men and women and the only way we'd ever be able to help the situation is if we committed troops there for the next one hundred years. Back to you, Dick.

In other words, it was a huge mistake:

DOWD: I would like to say, I worked for President Bush in his first election, helped him at the White House, worked on his second election, have a son who served in Iraq, two tours of duty in Iraq.

We all know -- most everybody knows -- that this has been a colossal waste of money and men and women -- the blood of men and women of our country, over 5,000 people have been killed, our armed services.

And this is going to end up costing us probably $3 trillion when you add all that into -- in the moment of this. We don't fix a first mistake by continuing to make a second mistake. And if you ask anybody that's an enlisted person in this, they will tell you that the only way this can be solved is you have to commit troops there for 100 years. Any enlisted person says...

STEPHANOPOULOS: That is not going to happen.

DOWD: That is not going to happen. And what we ought to do -- and we're on the 100th anniversary -- we were talking about, we're on the 100th anniversary of the killing of the archduke that brought us into World War I, where the borders of all of these countries were settled back then by European countries.

We are continuing to reap the problem of that in the Middle East in this situation. And I, for one, don't think we should send another man or another woman over there in a mistake that was made in the first place.

It was refreshing to hear Dowd say it, since most of the time we only get to hear Iraq war hawks blame Obama for losing the war.

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