I concur it is defensible.
My priors are not Taters' prior of course. I come out of that world where nails need hammers. Many people in that line have regrets now.
Accepting that Iraq was foisted on people for terrible reasons which I don't necessarily agree with but which had a terrible result. This was a failure of vision and strategy particularly because the management of it was done by overrated hacks (Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer) who thought it could all be done on the cheap. I clearly recall in 2000 prior to the election that I was part of a consultant team working on Rumsfeld and co's "Non-linear logistics" for the SecDEF and looked at it all and thought...this is gonna get a lot of people killed in a world where tactical airlift can be shot down as easily as it can. I wasn't even comprehending the decade's worst killer of US troops: the IED.
W's sins came with remorse. There is a difference. Trump killed hundreds of thousands who would otherwise have lived without his idiocracy. Trump is a Russian useful idiot (at a minimum).
A perfect version of a W presidency would have been him going into Afghanistan in 2002 -- somehow getting Pakistan to hand over UBL and us figuring out how not to stay in those countries but that wasn't going to happen. UBL and KSM were going to strike the US in 2001 so, it was inevitable that 9/11 was going to happen in some form to Bush or Gore. Not, having a 2500 (Afghanistan) or 4500 (Iraq) US military casualties and many tens of thousands of wounded besides over 20 years would be hard to put up against the numbers of preventable dead from COVID in that one year.