So the President has decide that Abu Ghraib was the biggest mistake of the war. In the words of Dana Carvey, "How conveeeeeenieeeeeeent."
As long as we are reviewing mistakes, which ones were "smaller" than Abi Ghraib:
Not having enough troops - As one Army commander said at the time "we have enough to get into a fight but not enough to get out of one." The standard refrain from some administration defenders is that the rapid pace of the initial victory proved that enough troops were in theater. This usually came from people who have never served a day while people like GEN Shinseki were ignored.
Dismissing the Army - Despite the fact that the post conflict plan was rooted in using the Iraqi Army and despite the military recommendation to retain the Army, it was dismissed. Only after things began to fall apart did the CPA decide the pay the Army - but by then they were already so pissed off that much of the money funded the insurgency.
De-Ba'athafication - Granted many Ba'athist were bad, bad people but included in the purge were people like the Iraqi General who was in charge of traffic in Baghdad. He was no more evil than a DMV worker but to do his job, he had to be a Ba'ath party member and because he was, we refused to let him do a job we desperately needed done.
Fallujah - Because of the horrible killing of the contractors, we dove into a fight we didn't want, didn't choose and didn't understand. The result was transforming a local insurgency into a region wide call to arms. We got suckered into acting like a bully.
Failing to care for the basics - Simple things like food, power, water, medicine and security. Maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff. Do those things and everything else follows. Hammas understands this and they were there in April 2003 with medical stations, generators and food aid. It was only later that they asked for suicide bombers.
These are just the mistakes I can think of off the top of my head and with my limited first hand knowledge. Did the President choose one of those? Nope. He chose the one where the most senior person "involved" is an Army E4. Sure one Reserve BG was administratively reduced but no one with any real responsibility has been punished and they never will. He conveniently choose as the "biggest mistake" something that he is so far from that he could never be blamed. The "kids' who did the bad things at Abu Ghraib were bored, scared and unsupervised. Even the mistakes at the senior levels were mistakes of omission rather than mistakes of commission.
So just to recap, in 2004, he couldn't think of a mistake that he had made. Now in 2006, the biggest mistake is not one he made at all, but one made by others and compounded by the inaction of others with no possible way for him to have been even a contributing factor. In other words, after more than 3 years and 2463 of my peers killed and 18,000 wounded, he still can't find a mistake. I guess I should be thankful. God forbid we had not been in an error free war.