Max Boot "At various points during the 16-plus years since 9/11, Americans have cheered the success of our armed forces in fighting terrorism. The first such moment was the rapid downfall of the Taliban regime in the fall of 2001, which led one American officer to crow that pitting the high-tech U.S. military against the primitive Taliban had been “the Flintstones meet the Jetsons.” Then, in the spring of 2003, came the equally sudden downfall of Saddam Hussein after the U.S. military’s “thunder run” into Baghdad, leading President George W. Bush to declare “Mission Accomplished.” The unexpected success of the surge in Iraq in 2007–8, after years of worsening violence, led to further cheering—but it was nothing compared with the cacophony of praise that greeted Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs in 2011. That feat alone practically guaranteed President Barack Obama’s reelection.
"And now we have arrived at yet another joyous moment, with the defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in sight." . . .
The truth is that this was a bipartisan triumph. While Trump committed slightly more U.S. forces to the fight and gave them slightly more permissive rules of engagement, his administration, by and large, followed the blueprint laid out by the Obama administration, of assisting indigenous forces to fight ISIS with advisers, air power, and even artillery rather than committing U.S. ground-combat forces. Much of the credit for routing ISIS belongs, in any case, not to politicians in Washington but to the fighters on the ground . . .
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