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cost almost 3,000 American lives and $2 billion a week, weakened America’s standing in the world, and strengthened our terrorist enemies, has forced the Washington power elite to acknowledge reality.

Bush’s almost immediate rejection of the report’s key findings, and his announced intention to escalate the war instead, was a potent sign of how isolated he had become.

T he Iraq War had become so manifest a failure by the end of 2006 that some prominent war supporters and prowar pundits were not merely changing their minds about the war, but were affirmatively denying that they ever supported it in the first place. In January 2007, Joe Klein, the longtime columnist for Time magazine, claimed on a Time website: “I’ve been opposed to the Iraq war ever since…2002.” But on February 23, 2003—exactly one month before the invasion of Iraq—Klein had been a guest on Meet the Press and had this exchange with Tim Russert:

KLEIN: This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it—it’s—it—it probably is.
RUSSERT: Now that’s twice you’ve said that: “It’s the right war.” You believe it’s the wrong time. Why do you think it’s the right war?
KLEIN: Because sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. Saddam has—Saddam Hussein has to be taken out.

For a public figure like Klein to claim that he was opposed to the Iraq War—even though he went on national television one month before it started to pronounce that war “probably” is “the right decision at this point”—demonstrates just how damaging Klein perceives being associated with the president’s decision to invade.
Like Klein, Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of National Review and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the National Review blog in November 2006: “I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.”
Ledeen, however, wrote in August 2002 of “the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein” and when he was interviewed for Front Page Magazine the same month and asked, “Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?” Ledeen replied: “Yesterday.” There is obvious, substantial risk in falsely claiming that one opposed the Iraq War notwithstanding a public record of support. But that war has come to be viewed as such a profound failure that that risk, at least in the eyes of some, is outweighed by the prospect of being associated with Bush’s invasion.
Perhaps most notably, even the aggressively loyal band of Bush supporters who have long stood behind the president on virtually every issue—who cheered on and enabled almost every decision—has been abandoning him as the perception grows that he is a weak and failed president.
For the first several years of the Bush presidency—up to and including his re-election—Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter to the president’s father who wrote Bush 41’s “thousand points of light” speech, employed her trademark effusiveness in her Wall Street Journal column and frequent television appearances in praise of the president’s character and integrity.
Yet by 2006, she began attacking him regularly—his performance in office as well as his character. Noonan focused specifically on what had previously been, in the eyes of his supporters, a great strength—namely his refusal to consider the possibility that he had erred and his belief that failure requires nothing more than increased determination to succeed. Noonan wrote in an October 2006 column:

I think that Americans have pretty much stopped listening to him. One reason is that you don’t have to listen to get a sense of what’s going on. He does not appear to rethink things based on new data. You don’t have to tune in to see how he’s shifting emphasis