The White House's passive-aggressive acquiescence to the abandonment of Iraq

Jonah Goldberg asks in his latest newsletter:

If the U.S. had wiped out most of the Japanese generals who plotted the Pearl Harbor attacks, but Japan was still at war with us, would anyone say "Well, we can wrap things up now"?

What if ISIS succeeds in holding onto Mosul and Nineveh? Or even goes on to grab Baghdad? What if Iran is fully drawn into the conflict, rendering vast swaths of the Middle East a literal battleground — and not just a figurative one — for a bloody Sunni — Shia civil war? Suddenly, the most momentous thing about 2011 wouldn't be the killing of one aging terrorist hermited away with his "Girls Gone Wild" DVDs. It would be the White House's passive-aggressive acquiescence to the abandonment of Iraq.

No, you cannot change the facts of the past. But you can change the significance of those facts. I'm not talking about Orwellian lying or Soviet airbrushing or the shoving of innocents down the memory hole. When new events take us by surprise the events that led up to it suddenly take on greater meaning.