Tim Hames of the Times Online has an article which he closes with this trenchant observation:
The tragedy of what went wrong in Iraq, therefore, is that the failure to locate WMD has made action against Iran or North Korea far harder to advance to Western public opinion. This would have been true even if Iraq, post invasion, was now a land of peace and plenty.
The final tragedy is that while many will prosper within Iraq over the next three years, the price of inept peacetime policies between 2003 and 2005 is that there will be no more Iraqs in the foreseeable future. To that extent, the Stop the War coalition, assisted, ironically, by the Pentagon, will be satisfied.
And what does this mean in practice? It means no more sadistic totalitarian dictators removed from office. It means no more free and fair elections for those who have never had them. It means no more openings for civic and religious liberty. It means no more chances of a cultural reawakening. Democracy might well progress in parts of the Middle East but, alas, mostly in the states that were most benign to begin with. There is little reason to suppose that the ruling elites in Damascus, Tehran or Tripoli have the cause for fear that they must have briefly felt three years ago. Nor have the people under their yoke any reason for optimism that they might yet escape servitude.
It has become fashionable in certain American neo-conservative circles to declare that Iraq has been "lost" and to wash their hands of the enterprise. Personally, I have never been part of that fraternity. It seems to me that their logic is dubious. Iraq has not been "lost", there is still a reasonable chance that by the actual seventh anniversary of the incursion the vast majority of people there will be more content than at any time in their history. It is the enslaved Middle East beyond Iraq that has been "lost" and thus remains an intense threat to our security.
Hames is almost certainly correct that the left has won a strategic victory in Iraq. It's a case of having lost the battle and won the war. They were unable to prevent the Iraq invasion, but by souring Americans on that undertaking they have almost guaranteed that whatever circumstances obtain in Iran or North Korea, the chances of military action in those climes are much diminished.
The administration must also be assigned some responsibility for making the left's victory an easy win, not because of their failed pre-war intelligence about WMD, because that appears to have been a universal mistake - even Saddam's top military officers were shocked to learn that they had no such weapons in their arsenal - but because the post-invasion phase of the war has been handled so badly.
Even this wouldn't have been too corrosive of American public support, though, if the administration had made a consistent, competent, articulate effort to keep the goals, necessity, and progress of the effort in Iraq in the public mind. This they haven't done, and their failure has contributed to the public perception of a land in hopeless chaos. The administration has allowed an antagonistic media to establish the psychological "wallpaper," as it were, for all thinking and public discussion on Iraq.
This is, in my mind, at least, the Bush administration's biggest failure. They forfeited this battle and ceded the field to the left when it would have been easy to keep fighting, and the consequences of their forfeiture will ripple through American foreign policy for decades.