You may think the issue which Republicans will lose on is Iraq, and you might be right. But psst... there's an elephant in the room: Afghanistan.
There were a few of us who clamored in the months after 2001 that a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan amounted to the type of feudal nation building in which Russia had already engaged and failed (to the point of creating the Taliban). I personally believed that--to the administration--Afghanistan was simply a show of arms after 9/11, and boy was I right, because Bush quickly lost interest and moved on to Iraq. The New York Times hits on this in an article today, How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad:
President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.
Of course, the New York Times really shouldn't be so surprised, and this really isn't new news. For years, NPR has been reporting on the mostly ignored, steady slide back to a pre-Taliban Afghanistan.
Now, for most of us this next statement is common sense: no one in Iraq attacked us on 9/11. Most of us realize that it made no sense to recklessly invade a country which at worst had remote links to Islamic fascists, and at best hated al Qaeda more than we do, when we were already on the heels of the terrorists which actually attacked us.
I applaud the New York Times for finally realizing that shucks, Afghanistan just isn't turning out that great. Yet they seem to forget that their very own publication was complicit in helping everyone take their eye off the ball. No longer content to be Bush's lapdog, now they realize that gee, maybe we shouldn't have focused so much on Iraq in lieu of Afghanistan. Maybe we only have limited resources and a mildly retarded executive which isn't capable of executing two wars at once, let alone one.