Late last week at Slate — yes, Slate — Yale senior fellow Emma Sky wrote an extended piece on the Obama administration’s failure to secure and consolidate the gains of the Surge, a failure that is costing tens of thousands of lives, has squandered American strategic advantage in the region, boosted Iran’s prestige and influence, and caused real anguish for vets who fought and bled “downrange.” Sky argues, quoting Iraqis, that there was nothing inevitable about Iraq’s recent decline:

“Was it inevitable that Iraq would disintegrate?” I asked Rafi. No, it was not, he assured me. Iraq had been moving in a positive direction after the surge. This downward trajectory began in 2010 when the United States had not upheld the right of Iraqiya to have first chance at trying to form the government after it won the elections. “We might not have succeeded,” he admitted, “but the process itself would have been important in building trust in Iraq’s young institutions.”

But in a pattern the administration would repeat in Libya and Yemen, the administration touted Iraq as a success well after it had set the stage for failure:

Since then, Obama had regularly cited ending the war in Iraq as one of his greatest foreign policy successes. On Nov. 1, 2013, with Maliki by his side in the White House, Obama stated: “We honor the lives that were lost, both American and Iraqi, to bring about a functioning democracy in a country that previously had been ruled by a vicious dictator. And we appreciate Prime Minister Maliki’s commitment to honoring that sacrifice by ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive and democratic Iraq.” He appeared to be paying scant attention to Maliki’s growing authoritarianism and the deteriorating situation in the country.

Sky’s piece is, of course, but one expert’s opinion — quoting selected Iraqi perspectives — but it’s important that Slate saw fit to publish it and challenge the bias of its own readers. One can believe that “Bush lied, and people died” yet still understand a strategic and moral imperative not to hand our enemies a victory. Even those who opposed the war from the beginning should be able to conceptualize how moderate continued American involvement could have prevented, among other things, the rise of ISIS to the status of the world’s most potent jihadist army. In other words, blame Bush, declare victory, and leave was never a viable strategy.