All things considered, this is kind of funny:
President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left before he vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama’s term — a near-certainty given the president’s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria — he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.
Huh. Maybe it isn't our fault that we are at war as the Left's popular explanation had it during the Bush 43 presidency.
Maybe the endless hatred and depravity of our jihadi enemies has something to do with being at war.
Maybe we really are fighting wars of choice--wars of our enemies' choices.
As I've droned on about many times, talk of "exit strategies" rather than talk of how to achieve victory is nonsense because an exit strategy assumes our enemies allow us to exit the war rather than keep killing us.
So guess what has happened.
As I noted some time ago, the president already took the lead in the number of wars being fought at once. So this new measure is hardly out of nowhere.
But is all this really shocking? President Obama did bomb the moon early in his first term.
Although it is our fault when it takes us as long to liberate Mosul as it took us to build and deploy the military power to launch the D-Day invasion in 1944.
So we should try to win and not just manage the fighting to acceptable levels of collateral damage that we can easily absorb, eh?
Heck, we declined to try to defeat Assad several hundred thousand dead ago to avoid making the situation worse, in the belief that the collateral damage would be acceptable.
Maybe it is just me, but isn't the war fueled by jihadis in Syria--now past the 400,000 dead mark--darn close to posing an existential threat to the state of Syria with boundaries we still have on the maps?
Because one day, because of their endless hate, maybe our jihadi enemies will manage to pose an "existential threat" to our nation.
