That is quite an admission by itself, but his further elaboration includes laying responsibility for the present stalemate (the rise of Isis) at the door of the corrupt sectarian al-Maliki regime and of the American citizenry unwilling to commit to decades of war.
While the general suggests a non-partisan commission is needed to assess the full responsibility for the failures, his own revisionism of history fails - even as he admits his own flawed part in it - to account for the facts of this ongoing history.
First there is the phony basis for the invasion, and the fact that its occurrence fulfilled the wildest hopes of Osama Bin Laden, a Sunni Wahhabi Muslim, who had to be delighted by America's invasion of a majority Shiite nation, one ruled as a secular dictatorship.
The general's own myth elides the reasons for the immediate failure of the occupation by the political misjudgments of the Bush team - the open looting of Baghdad, labelled "shit happens" by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the "insurgency" created when Bush's viceroy, L Paul Bremer, disbanded the Baathist-led Iraqi Army, putting 200,000 men with access to arms suddenly out of work.
The admission of the phony effectiveness of the surge is important but is only part of the story.
As the chief architect of the surge, and of the "counter-insurgency", General David Petraeus has acknowledged in a Frontline documentary on Iraq that he personally authorised the payment of millions of US dollars to Sunni chieftains to buy their co-operation in fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq rather than their continuing engagement with their Shiite fellow Iraqis in a civil war.
The current myth also blames President Barack Obama for withdrawing American troops from Iraq in 2011 and thereby somehow fostering the development of Isis.
While that withdrawal happened to coincide with a campaign pledge candidate Obama made in 2008, the fact is that President George W Bush in December 2008, just after the election which made him a lame duck, travelled to Iraq and signed an agreement with the al-Maliki government that guaranteed American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.
This myth-making leads me to an admission of my own ...
In an opinion piece of August 13, 2014, I argued that Isis, with its sophisticated weaponry, its expansionist designs and its brutality, presented an existential threat that warranted an international military response, including one from America and its allies.
Judging from the lack of serious response from those nations with powerful armies in the immediate neighbourhood who ought to feel threatened - Turkey, say, or Iran - I must confess to being unduly influenced in my rush to judgment.
I choose not to join the fearmongers, and instead urge more measured steps to contain any threat Isis may pose.
It happens that is one place of agreement with General Bolger - he's no fan of any further surges.
His ideology remains dogmatic, but the memories on Veterans Day of the 80 men he lost in Iraq lead him now to moderation.
