Many of the commentators in the Fox News stable were outspoken advocates of the war in Iraq. They have reacted to President Obama's announcement that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year by expressing disapproval and a desire to remain in Iraq for decades, despite the fact that the central justification for the war -- Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction -- turned out to be completely wrong.

On the October 21 edition of Special Report, Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer trashed the Obama administration over the announcement. Hayes called the withdrawal “a major setback” and “a disservice to our men and women in uniform,” and Krauthammer said it was a “big, big failure.”

Krauthammer also endorsed keeping tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq “the same way that we retained forces in Korea, Germany, and Japan 50 years ago, to our advantage”:

Hayes' advocacy for the Iraq war is especially embarrassing, given that he wrote a book titled The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. The 2004 book was premised on a discredited Defense Department memo, and the idea of an operational link between Saddam and Al Qaeda has been utterly debunked in the years since its release.

On the October 22 edition of On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, Fox News contributor John Bolton also called the withdrawal “a mistake.” Bolton was an early advocate of invading Iraq, having signed a 1998 letter from the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, to President Clinton calling for military action against Iraq.

During the discussion, Van Susteren asked Bolton, "[A]t what point, though, do you get out, do you say, 'Look, it's time to go home'?"

Bolton replied, “We're still in Germany. We're still in Japan”: