But if the media are going to play these games, then let me add a few. I’m pretty sure that President Roosevelt would have increased patrols around Oahu on the morning of December 7, 1941. I don’t think King Philip II of Spain would have sent his Armada into the English Channel in the summer of 1588. And I’m fairly certain that Red Sox owner Harry Frazee would not have sold Babe Ruth’s contract rights to the New York Yankees.

But the more important question is not how Hillary Clinton and others have changed their minds on Iraq; it’s how she and the president she worked for have learned the wrong lesson from that conflict. Because this decade’s answer to an Iraqi regime that did not in reality possess large numbers of chemical and biological weapons is not to leave Iran within easy striking distance of a nuclear bomb…

In short, Iran is much more of a threat now than Iraq was then. But President Obama seems ready to pay any price to get a deal — any deal — out of Iran. So unwilling to contemplate a military engagement in the Middle East is he, he appears scared of his shadow. Yet if the shadow of Barack Obama circa 2002 were around today, he would not call Iran a “dumb war.” To the contrary, he might even consider taking the military option off the table to be, well, dumb.

I don’t relish this criticism, nor the thought of armed conflict with Iran. I deprecate war in all its forms and consider it the ultimate last resort. But a last resort it must always remain.