We Won!

Suppose we won a war and no one noticed. In this case “no one” does not mean “no one.” After all, this very blog reported on the American victory over ISIS ten days ago.

And yet, the mainstream media has not been touting the great American victory in Iraq and Syria… because, to their minds, if it makes Donald Trump look good, you must ignore it completely.

In the case of the war against ISIS Trump knew enough to put the generals in charge. He did not hamstring them with legalistic rules of engagement. He told them to do the job and they did the job.

Ross Douthat has the story (via Maggie’s Farm):

There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice.

I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams. Its defeat was begun under Obama, and the hardest fighting has been done by Iraqis — but this was an American war too, and we succeeded without massive infusions of ground troops, without accidentally getting into a war with Russia, and without inspiring a huge wave of terrorism in the West.

Yes, indeed. As Roger Cohen also averred in the same New York Times, the war in Syria was an Obama administration failure. The administration let ISIS run free and that meant torture and executions, sex slavery and rapes, throwing homosexuals off of buildings. All the while the Obama administration stood by, impotent and whining in its cocoa.

Of course, the press is not reporting the victory because it would make Trump look good.

But this is also a press failure, a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested.

Douthat had not been optimistic about Donald Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy. Neither had I. And yet, the facts are the facts… don’t you remember when everyone was so concerned about the facts… and we must report them fairly and objectively:

But if you had told me in late 2016 that almost a year into the Trump era the caliphate would be all-but-beaten without something far worse happening in the Middle East, I would have been surprised and gratified. So very provisionally, credit belongs where it’s due — to our soldiers and diplomats, yes, but to our president as well.