This is about as close as I’ve seen the Neo-Conservatives saying, "We screwed up".
In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.
President Bush no longer stressed Saddam’s record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president’s credibility that had already been caused by the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power. "How Bush Sold the War" (via WSJ.com)
The problem was, they never found the WMD’s. They actually admit that, in this piece.
Feith goes on:
But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.
This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.
To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president’s shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president’s words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.
The sad part about all this is, The Neo-Conservatives have so badly damaged the Conservative movement, that it will take years, if not decades to fix the damage done. All because of a single piece of flawed CIA intelligence. All because Bush, in his blind arrogance, did not follow the simple Russian proverb, "Trust, but verify." There is even talk, among some circles that Bush even went as far to attempt to smear or destroy those who dared to challenge him. Valerie Plame is a good example of this. Although, there are those who dispute her story with varying degrees of vibrato.
Others: via Memeorandum