The narrow lane that Rubio is trying to manage here is that he doesn’t want to say that the war was a mistake. That’s politically toxic because it puts a firmly negative judgment on a foreign policy worldview Rubio largely shares. More important, it suggests that the men and women who died in that war died in vain. This is the same lane Hillary Clinton tried to navigate during the 2008 campaign when she backed away from her vote authorizing the war, but refused to call that vote a mistake. She said she didn’t want to use that word while combat operations were still taking place. Many Democrats believe this equivocation cost her the nomination that year.

To avoid danger, Rubio and others argue that the reason the war was not a mistake is that George Bush made the right call based on the information he had at the time. This position puts them on more defensible political ground. Seventy percent of the country may think the Iraq war wasn’t worth it now, but a lot of them thought the war was worth it in the spring of 2003, when more than 70 percent of the country supported the war.

But even if you thought you were right in the first place, if your decision turns out to be wrong, then that is commonly called a mistake…

This is what was always so powerful about Ronald Reagan’s distinction about liberals: Their hearts were in the right place, but that didn’t make them right when their choices led to bad outcomes.