He meant it. He did.

Barack Obama caved. He did.

On Sunday he said "we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."

Now, he says "Even as I said it, I realized I had misspoken." He added that he would "absolutely apologize" to military families if they were offended by a remark he made in Iowa while criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

Those lives were indeed "wasted", Mr Obama. You meant it - and you were right. And now you're going to run from the specter of having somehow "offended" this phantasm, this non-existent monolithic bloc of "military families," by calling the administration on their criminal conduct of this war.

You said this: “What I would say — and meant to say — is that their service hasn’t been honored, because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.”

What does that even mean? Our civilian strategy didn't honor their courage and did put them in a situation in which it is "hard" for them to succeed? (Hard???) If that's not wasting them, what is? If sending them to fight a war for lies, a war in which they aren't supported, in which their goals are impossible to achieve, doesn't qualify as wasting their lives, what would?

What did they die for, Mr Obama, that makes their lives not "wasted"?

You shouldn't have apologized. And you shouldn't have taken that word back.

It was a true word. And that's what you should have known "even as [you] said it." And you should have the courage to stand by it.