Anyone old enough to remember the height of the Iraq-War carnage of the early Bush years can recall images and audio of Ann Coulter—a right-wing columnist and longtime cable-news fixture—appointing herself one of the country’s loudest, most flamboyant war defenders and cheerleaders in national media. Coulter’s 2003 bestselling book was, after all, titled, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, and in November 2005 bashed “the Democrats” as “gutless traitors.”

But just two short administrations later, Coulter’s Iraq-occupation fandom has melted into an “America First” aversion to further military “meddling” in the Middle East. It’s a tone and posturing that would make her onetime neoconservative allies and fanboys wince and side-eye.

But only until fairly recently, she had yet to alter her tune on the war in Iraq.

“I think Iraq was a crucial part of the war on terrorism—if you had to choose between Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d take Iraq over Afghanistan,” Coulter said on a Fox Business panel, debating anti-war libertarians, in late 2011. “PATRIOT Act, fantastic, Gitmo, fantastic, waterboarding, not bad, though [even harsher] torture would’ve been better.”