Ending a war in which there is no clear victory is an anticlimactic thing. The flag-draped coffins and funerals were over, as was the $10 billion a month price tag. But by the time we finished pulling out, the focus on Iraq had faded—it was a marker of a different era, the defining event of a different presidency. The only thing that wouldn’t fade was the effort to shape the perception of what had happened there. For years to come, the war’s supporters would blame the further tragedies that would take place in Iraq on the fact that we didn’t keep those ten thousand troops there, rather than on
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