In the spring of 2003, I was in Baghdad when President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared “Mission Accomplished.” The city was burning around me with the first embers of the insurgency that would consume Iraq for years. We knew, those of us on the ground, that the mission was far from accomplished. But Bush’s cringe worthy triumphalism had a certain recognizable political logic: he wanted to show his countrymen and the wider world that the sacrifice,