I celebrate this victory, but please forgive me if I look immediately turn to WaPo's treatment of President Trump. The first mention of him is in paragraph 4, and it's negative:
The militants switched gears as territorial defeat loomed, seeding sleeper cells across former strongholds as they prepared a new phase of insurgency. U.S. military officials have also warned that President Trump’s planned troop withdrawal — the shape of which remains unclear — has the potential to create a security vacuum within which the Islamic State could regroup.Next we see that the dramatic success of the "caliphate" occurred under Obama:
The U.S.-led military campaign began in September 2014 after the Islamist militants rampaged through Iraq, seizing a third of its territory in the space of a week. They described the land that they seized as an Islamic State, and it often bore the hallmarks of a real one. Bureaucrats dealt with household bills and garbage collection. The group even minted its own coins.Notice that Obama is not mentioned. But the next sentence refers to the current president and just calls him "the president," which I found disorienting because I saw "2014" and thought about Obama:
For the president, victory against the Islamic State marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise and as the battle ground toward its conclusion, Trump had repeatedly declared the group defeated.So the horrible events that happened under Obama's watch are never tied to his name, and then Trump is not named next to the word "victory" — "For the president, victory" — but he is named later in the sentence where it's more negative — Trump "repeatedly declared" something that sounds wrong, that the group was "defeated" when that didn't happen until just now.
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Written that way on purpose.
This just shows that if he had the will and brains, Obama could have finished ISIS off YEARS AGO.
I saw a movie once about the Viet Nam era that never once referred Lyndon Johnson, it only referenced “the administration.” I talked to a millennial who is a libertarian, but he believes that Nixon started the Viet Nam War.
Lap it up moonbats.
Howard Dean congratulates Obama, but who congratulated Dick Cheney for setting up Seal Team Six? They called it his “assassination squad” while he was still “Vice.”
And BTW, who congratulated Cheney for this planning conference with oil industry executives which was widely excoriated at the time, and yet now the US is THE major oil producer in the world.
It’s almost as if they have an agenda.... Naah!
Time for the War on Error.
It’s the old problem of fighting the last war. We withdrew our troops for Iraq and ISIS surged. The worry is that will happen again. The reductionism to Trump v. Obama isn’t helpful to looking at what we should do next. But as a country we care more about that than we can about Iraq and Syria, don’t we.
Really should call it the Bezos Wash Post to be clear about what it is.
The MSM has already lost the trust of more than half of the population. They continue to work on the other half.
Proof the power of the pen is mightier than the sword, on whom gets credit.
Good to know the wp has good editors, this took a lot of work to give Trump no credit, and not mention Obama. I wonder how many revisions were required?
But I am sure the lame-stream media will say that the defeat of ISIS is not total, saying there may be remnants or individuals still engaged.
But for those of us who do not believe history is only fifteen minutes, we will conclude this is similar to the Japanese soldiers on remote islands or caves, who did not hear of or refused to accept the surrender and fought on for years.
Pathetic
https://twitter.com/GovHowardDean/status/1109227106385436672
I would have capitalized "president" when referring to the President formerly known as Trump.
@Left Bank of the Charles
It will happen again. In that part of the world? Always. Which is why SDF should execute their ISIL prisoners on the banks of the Tigris and we should surreptitiously 'salt the earth'.
But hey, the course of action I'd suggest is the course of action I can't suggest except here. So yeah, we'll be back...
As Glenn R. says, just think of the press as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you won't be wrong.
Why is that not a strategy?
- Crush territorial stronghold.
- Cede a contained area and thereby avoid occupation and peacekeeping exposure.
- Crush eventual regroupment according to your own timeline.
- Repeat.
This is like Ed Driscoll noting routinely the absence of the word "socialism" from negative articles related to problems in Venezuela. We can laugh at the coyness today, but the media wants to make sure future research of historical events never discovers the truth.
B.S. Isis, al Qaeda, al Shabaab, etc. and so forth are only names. Radical, or rather fundamental, Islam is like a metastazing cancer that pops up here and there and everywhere with these names. But it is all the same disease.
Aunty Trump: " I talked to a millennial who is a libertarian, but he believes that Nixon started the Viet Nam War"
Recall that it was John Kerry, who happened to serve in Vietnam, "forgot" that his Christmas 1968 war "memory" moment was during Johnson's term and so stood up in front of the world and called Vietnam "Mr Nixon's War".
Filed under "The Many Many Ways Democrats and the Left and the LLR's Rewrite History"
Obama will get credit for everything good that happens until a gay or female Democrat is elected President.
It’s the old problem of fighting the last war. We withdrew our troops for Iraq and ISIS surged.
Wow, a leftie concedes that Obama fucked up and created ISIS. I thought that this was proven to be untrue because none of ISIS founding documents had Obama’s signature on them.
I don't think there's any question but that Obama was a more dutiful and faithful husband than Trump. The American people don't care about this Syria sideshow. I'm surprised the Post bothers to report on this trivia. We need to know more about Stormy Daniels and her quest for justice and truth.
Obama dismissed ISIS as the JV team. Smartest president ever.
The assessment is based on the current and forward-looking state of ISIS and the effectiveness of multiple regional powers, including a Russian-allied Syria, working together to assume responsibility and maintain a stable order.
"has the potential to create a security vacuum within which the Islamic State could regroup."
As long as there is that POTENTIAL, Trump can NEVER claim victory over the Caliphate.
Just another day at the office for the WaPo crew, covering for some and smearing others, and never being forthright about any of it.
Well done, team!!!
The defeat of Isis in Syria by President Trump is no big deal, they were just the JV.
WaPo = Democratic Media Industrial Complex. Reality dies in darkness.
Good to know the wp has good editors, this took a lot of work to give Trump no credit, and not mention Obama. I wonder how many revisions were required?
@Ray, damned right it did! This is why Post editors make the big bucks. And why we need J-Schools.
The big thing that happened in Defense and in Syria after Trump took over was that Obama stopped micromanaging the targets while kneeling on the Oval office floor and Trump turned operations over to the professionals (e.g Mattis, etal) with strategic instructions that "we win, they lose"
There will be another ISIS, this is certain.
Such outbreaks are an inherent characteristic of Islam.
Islamic countries with any degree of stability put a lot of effort into suppression and displacement of these tendencies.
ISIS and also, often forgotten, Al Qaeda affiliates in the Syrian opposition, grew in Syria because of the opportunities offered by the chaos of the Syrian civil war. ISIS opportunistically invaded Iraq because the Iraqi government of the time was ridiculously incompetent.
Such circumstances will, in an Islamic context, always breed things like ISIS.
I agree with you buwaya, and that’s why it so. hard to understand why the Obama administration poured money and weapons into the Syrian civil war, when he rode into office on the repudiation of that kind of foreign policy. We made it hard for Assad to keep that element under control.
The claim that the US and its allies were fighting ISIS is laughable. For years, the US permitted ISIS to run large oil tank truck convoys up the Euphrates River Valley into Turkey, where the oil was sold on the world market. ISIS also got large numbers of fighters and and large amounts munitions that had to cross territory controlled by the US and its allies. A great many weapons supposedly given to anti-Assad forces ended up in ISIS' hands. Even at the end, the main ISIS camp was only miles from a US base, and went unmolested.
Parts of an interview with Abu Mansour al Maghrebi, the ISIS Ambassador to Turkey, is given by Moon of Alabama,
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/03/wapo-gives-campaign-space-to-main-sponsor-of-isis-who-also-jails-more-journalists-than-anyone-else.html#more
Mansour notes that ISIS was allied with Turkey, Qatar and some other Arab states, and that Turkey not only permitted all the cross border transfers, Turkey supplied medical and support to wounded ISIS fighters. There was detailed coordination between Turkey's military and intelligence services and ISIS, and Mansour was an eyewitness to much of it.
The full story of ISIS may never come out, but the US, Israel, and Jordan were ISIS allies, at least until ISIS threatened to conquer Baghdad. Then it was not only an embarrassment, it was a threat. Even so, it was Russia, Assad, Iran and Hezbollah that fought and defeated ISIS. Even in Iraq, it was Iran, the Shia Iraqi government, and the Shia militias that fought ISIS. The Kurds and the US stood aside, as they did in Syria.
The number of lies about America's real foreign policy and foreign adventures is stupefying. It is clear that no President has or had control of the US military or foreign service. If any did, it was Eisenhower, and he was the last.
Sykes
One of the reasons apparently that Obama refused to strike those fuel delivery convoys was the off chance that a truck driver was forced to drive, thus a "civilian"
Well if “Moon of Alabama” says so....
The Pope was being hosted by President Trump at Mar a Lago. His hat blew into the ocean. Trump stood up and walked over the waves to retrieve the Pope's hat. The headline in the Washington Post was "Trump doesn't know how to swim!"
Which is the greater enemy of the American people, ISIS or WAPO?
Excellent analysis of the article, and spot on. If I had time I would wade into the comments for the Article and troll the post readers.
But I have reports to write.
The rise of ISIS was primarily due to the US, in concert with regional powers like Turkey, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia thought it would be good to arm and fund radical insurgents in Syria to make war against the Assad regime. And then when the ISIS problem revealed itself, the US found itself in the bizarre position of trying to oppose both Assad and the ISIS forces threatening his government. The best strategy was to stop trying to bring the Assad regime down. The small contingent of forces that will be left behind (how fast did Trump flip-flop on that) has nothing to do with stopping ISIS but rather as a counter to Iran. The Trump administration and its Israel First policy are obsessed with Iran, and this monomaniacal obsession with Iran has the author of the all of the middle east's problems, in addition to being wrong, continually leads the US into foolish foreign policy decisions. Our unquestioning support for an incompetent, cruel, and destructive figure like Mohammed bin Salman is another consequence of this. Bringing back a serial buffoon like John Bolton into the national security apparatus is yet another example of Trump's godawful decision-making skills. The so called maximum pressure campaigns, championed by bozos like Bolton and Pompeo, have been total failures.
that was more likely true with al queda's stalking horse in Syria, muhaysini, and his army of conquest, the umbrella group which includes nusra front, the salafi in Iraq, have much the same goal that the golden square and the baath have, kill the infidel, baathism's vaunted secularism had become a memory by the 90s.
This is why I call the WaPoo the "Wapoo".
Trump changed the ROE, Rules of Engagement. Anyone who has followed military affairs for the last two decades has heard the complaints about checking tactical details through JAGs due to restricted ROEs.
Funny how much military success can be had by getting right down to the killing.
@Milwaukie guy:
Trump changed the ROE, Rules of Engagement. Anyone who has followed military affairs for the last two decades has heard the complaints about checking tactical details through JAGs due to restricted ROEs.
Funny how much military success can be had by getting right down to the killing.
This is a common refrain and I think largely a myth. It basically comes from a WWII obsession in which the allied bombings of Germany and Japan are held up as the reason we win wars and that if the US does not win wars, it is because we have simply become too squeamish about killing innocents and destroying things. It is illogical to say that because a tactic was successful in one war, it must be successful in another, without considering that vast differences between the nature of certain wars. The Trump administration changed the ROE for Afghanistan, too. You see victory around the corner there? (btw, two more American soldiers recently lost their lives in that stupid, idiotic conflict.
Also, I'm not quite sure how one can that American aerial bombardment was the critical dimension when a large array of forces were brought against ISIS, including the military forces of Syria and Iraq, Syrian and Kurdish militias, and Russia. International efforts to starve ISIS of financial resources also played a part. But it's worth remembering that ISIS was never actually a significant force. They were a weak, poorly organized proto-state that managed to take advantage of the chaos in Syria, a chaos we helped create, and were essentially besieged on all fronts.
The Gulf Cooperation Council's armed forces using the latest US supplied miracle weapons wiped them out fast with few casualties of their own. These were US Special Forces trained Arab soldiers with US Air support. Isis had no chance at all.
Trump's magnificent Military and its Saudi allies were ordered to go WIN. That combination has has made him greatly beloved American President in the Middle East.
@traditionalguy:
Your comments almost read like Titania McGrath-level satire.
The Gulf Cooperation Council's armed forces using the latest US supplied miracle weapons wiped them out fast with few casualties of their own.
What have you been smoking? Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE ceased intervening in Syria in 2016. And of course, the GCC is largely responsible for the problem (with the assistance and acquiescence of the US) since they were arming and funding Sunni jihadists to make war against the Syrian state. Russia and Iran were more involved in defeating ISIS than any of the GCC countries.
The problem is the base of al queda doesn't lie in either Afghanistan or Syria but largely in the west.
@narciso:
The problem is the base of al queda doesn't lie in either Afghanistan or Syria but largely in the west.
I think the problem is more how wildly overblown the threat from Al Qaeda is. Al Qaeda is a big nothingburger. The Al Qaeda of 9/11 doesn't even really exist anymore. Mostly what's called AL Qaeda today are basically longstanding insurgency/militant groups that have existed for decades and have simply adopted the Al Qaeda brand name. They next no to know capacity to seriously challenge US security interests, and the notion that we need to deploy military force all over the globe to try to defeat it is a colossally bad strategy.
Actually Thomas wictor has mined much footage of Islamic state takedowns, now he's at quod vorum
When your enemy is holed up in villages separated by relatively flat, barren terrain, the liberal application of artillery and aerial bombardment seems like a great force multiplier.
I don't know how that relates to mountainous Afghanistan or the claims of WW2 strategic airpower enthusiasts.
@Milwaukie guy:
When your enemy is holed up in villages separated by relatively flat, barren terrain, the liberal application of artillery and aerial bombardment seems like a great force multiplier.
Well, ISIS was not merely holed up in "villages" but also a number of urban areas, like Raqqa, Mosul, and Ramadi. Also, ISIS' territorial peak occurred in 2014. By early 2017, it had lost more than half of its territorial holdings. ISIS was well on its way to being defeated, so the notion that a change in the ROE by American forces represents said critical change to the fight against ISIS that resulted in victory doesn't hold water.
I don't know how that relates to mountainous Afghanistan or the claims of WW2 strategic airpower enthusiasts.
Your comment: "Trump changed the ROE, Rules of Engagement. Anyone who has followed military affairs for the last two decades has heard the complaints about checking tactical details through JAGs due to restricted ROEs."
The ROE were also changed in Afghanistan. What's been the result? Any closer to defeating the Taliban?
Village, city, all were favored with more liberal applications of indirect fire.
While I don't really know the Syrian anti-regime forces order of battle, to my mind they were lacking artillery heavier than mortars and had no air force. In the eastern desert and Euphrates valley there were two more years of hard fighting past your early 2017 benchmark. Are you saying that the change of ROE was of no consequence at all?
I'm not sure what the change of ROE meant in Afghanistan. I didn't realize the U.S. was still seriously trying to defeat the Taliban. It sure doesn't look that way to me.
@Milwaukie guy:
In the eastern desert and Euphrates valley there were two more years of hard fighting past your early 2017 benchmark.
Sure. I did not say that they were defeated in early 2017. But they had lost more than half the territory they previously controlled in 2014 and were on the decline.
Are you saying that the change of ROE was of no consequence at all?
To say it was "of no consequence" is probably going too far. But I do not consider it some marked shift in strategy that represents any kind of turning point in the battle against ISIS. As I said, they were being continually beaten back. And I would argue that even had the ROE not been changed, they would have continued to be beaten back.
I didn't realize the U.S. was still seriously trying to defeat the Taliban. It sure doesn't look that way to me.
Thankfully US strategists are finally coming to understand that defeating the Taliban makes no sense and was never a good idea in the first place. Their hosting of Osama bin Laden was mainly a function of his ties with Mullah Omar. It was a divisive issue among the Taliban, many of who wanted him expelled.
And changing the ROE was probably a morale booster, too. Nobody appreciates interference from remfs.
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