From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On the end of combat operations in Iraq:

There are a lot of ironies here. The Democrats complained for years that the Bush administration had had us at the cusp of success at the beginning of the Afghan war, turned away its attention to Iraq, and as a result we’re in the mess we are now.
I think that is absolutely the wrong analysis. I don’t know what the Democrats would have suggested as an alternative — half a million troops in Afghanistan? I can’t imagine any Democrat would ever have offered that as an alternative.
The irony is, however, that here we are with Iraq on the cusp of success when the war was handed over from the Bush administration to Obama on Inauguration Day — we had a military success accomplished; Petraeus had done that with the surge — … and it’s now turned its attention away to Afghanistan … I’m with Michael O’Hanlon, the prescient and even-handed analyst from the Brookings Institution, who says this is a mistake. You don’t declare an arbitrary milestone on a fixed timetable when you have no Iraqi government and al-Qaeda is resurgent. You do it when you have a stable government and then … the president and the new leader of Iraq have a ceremony in which the transition is declared and mutually acknowledged. This is premature and political and it could be very costly.