Was the Iraq War a huge coup for liberalism?

These liberal policy victories have been accompanied by liberal gains in the culture wars. True, there's no necessary connection between the Bush administration's Iraq floundering and, say, the right's setbacks in the gay-marriage debate. But cultural change is a complicated thing, built on narratives and symbols and intuitive leaps.... Even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren't culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well. Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy, and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration's blunders — the missing WMD, the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness. Of all the Iraq war's consequences for our politics, it's this narrative that may be the war's most lasting legacy, and the most difficult for conservatives to overcome. [New York Times]

To believe that Iraq was responsible for this, you have to adopt the perverse view that a huge foreign policy failure was responsible for (a) a continuation of that very foreign policy, but (b) a repudiation of Bush's completely unrelated domestic policy. That doesn't strike me as very plausible. Unfortunately the evidence suggests just the opposite: on a wide variety of measures, the effect of the Iraq War has actually been startlingly modest. It played no more than a bit role in ushering us into the Obama Era. [Mother Jones]

Republicans still don't seem to understand just how unpopular the Bush administration's foreign policy, and its policies regarding the Iraq War specifically and intervention in foreign countries more specifically, [were] ... It's easy, and in many cases too easy, to point to a single factor to explain something as complicated as the reason why the Republican Party finds itself in its current predicament. Nonetheless, one cannot deny that the most mistaken and unpopular war in American history has had a significant impact on the party that initiated it. [Outside the Beltway]