While I understand where he is coming from, saying "when you call the Iraqi war a mistake, you disrespect the service and the sacrifice of everyone that has died promoting freedom" is not true. There is a huge difference between calling a military operation a mistake and disrespecting individual soldiers. If ~90k civilian Iraqi deaths means spreading our view of freedom to a part of the world the average American will never be able to understand, then that's very scary.

The fact is, no matter how horrible a decision of military action is made, saying it was a poor choice is not a comment at the individuals fighting the war, it's of the leaders in the government that made the final decision to conduct the action. The Vietnam conflict is widely seen as a military failure on the part of the US, yet saying so is not an attack on individuals that fought there, including John McCain.