This week marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. It has also been a little over a year since the Bush Administration decided to increase the number of troops in Iraq. The logic of ’’the surge’ involved placing enough American troops into Iraq to buy the Iraqi politicians time to hold political reconciliation meetings to resolve their differences. The surge had a purpose, it was never an end in and of itself. The troops were there to bring some stability to the country so that the politicians could meet and resolve their differences enough to take the steps necessary to begin to govern their country.

The Washington Post ran a story by Karen DeYoung on March 19th quoting a Bush official’s lament about the dialogue on the war. He wants Americans to not dwell on what happened in the first four years of the war, but to think happy thoughts about everything that has happened since the surge started. Oddly enough, people still seem to think of the Iraq war as beginning in March of 2003. They don’t seem to want to think of the first four years of the war as a mere prologue to the surge. This Bush official seemed a bit down that the public has not fully bought into this revision of history.

For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed.

It has been about a year since Army Gen. David H. Petraeus arrived to command U.S. forces in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker took over as the chief U.S. diplomat, and the military deployed 30,000 more troops to protect and rebuild neighborhoods.

Officials now running the U.S. effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new political, security and economic policies – in particular, sharply reduced violence – are continually weighed against the first four years of the war, when Iraq unraveled in insurgency and sectarian strife.

“I came to Washington to describe what we’re doing,” Charles P. Ries, Crocker’s senior deputy in charge of reconstruction and the Iraqi economy, said during a visit last week. “At almost every meeting, somebody wants me to describe what we used to do. ... I know why people raise these questions, but I don’t feel it’s something I can speak to. The times were different then.”

Normally, ‘do-overs’ are things that you associate with sports or games. Someone might make a bad pitch in a pick-up softball game and they get a do-over or a golfer hanging out with friends takes a ‘mulligan’ because the score doesn’t matter much on this outing. Mulligans and do-overs are not words usually associated with war though. I don’t think many Americans would agree that the Bush Administration gets to press the ‘reset’ key on the Iraq war. Those first 4 years did happen, there were horrendous mistakes made and those mistakes can’t be pushed aside because they are uncomfortable. War doesn’t have do-overs, it has lasting consequences.

Mr. Ries sounds annoyed that people keep bringing up all the mistakes of the early stages of the war. Sure, mistakes were made, but that is all ancient history now, he seems to be saying. Americans should forget all that stuff about the faulty planning for the post- invasion and how fast things went bad in Iraq. What is the point of looking at all that old stuff anyway? It just makes people feel bad. We should just forget that and remember that the reset button has been pressed on Iraq.

Instead, we should be looking at the progress that has been made since March of last year. All that progress. The troop increase has helped to stabilize the violence to what it was in 2005-2006. But the purpose of the surge was to give the Iraqis time to solve their political differences. Then US troops could begin to be withdrawn according to a sensible schedule. Maybe Mr. Ries needs to read this story that also ran in Wednesday’s Washington Post.

BAGHDAD, March 18—A conference intended to bring together Iraq’s rival sectarian groups foundered Tuesday when the leading Sunni political bloc boycotted the event and reiterated its demands for greater participation in the Shiite-led government.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki opened the conference here in the Green Zone, the fortified seat of government and the U.S. diplomatic mission, by saying that reconciliation among rival factions is the “only rescue boat and the best solution to build a federal democratic Iraq.”

“We seriously regret that some stand watching and others try to bring down the political process and obstruct the work of the government,” said Maliki, who is Shiite. “At a time when their patriotic duty requires them to help and support the government.”

National reconciliation here has always been primarily about bringing Shiites and Sunnis into closer political partnership, a chief reason the Bush administration increased U.S. troop levels last year. But the boycott of the Baghdad conference by the Iraqi Accordance Front, a Sunni political bloc, illustrated how divided the two groups remain.

So, this is the first anniversary of ‘the surge’ and the Iraqis still won’t negotiate and are still squabbling about their political differences. Maybe people aren’t celebrating the first anniversary of the surge because they don’t actually see anything of note to celebrate. Maybe it just looks a lot like the other 4 years of the war so far.