Mark Steyn: "Baghdadi Bagged"

This weekend, half a decade after that shameful image, US special forces arrived at the door of the wannabe caliph. After dragging three kids and two missuses down into a dead-end tunnel, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself and his family to Virgin Central. He left his head, more or less intact, which I wouldn't be averse to Trump putting on a spike across the street from The Washington Post. The Post's obituaries department, to general derision from the Internet, marked the Caliph's unexpected self-detonation with the headline "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48".
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Four months after Kayla Mueller's execution, Donald Trump came down that escalator. He is not to everyone's taste stylistically but he is a more serious man than his predecessor, and than many of his GOP rivals, who simply assumed that a Republican restoration would mean a return to Bush-style "war on terror". Trump grasped a simple truth but one apparently beyond Bill Kristol & Co - that there are no takers for ineffectual warmongering. If "shock and awe" had actually shocked and awed, things might be different. But it didn't. As I wrote in The Spectator a little over sixteen years ago, or about six months after my mixed grill in post-Saddam Rutba - October 11th 2003:

In a nutshell, Iraq is the last war. That's to say, the last war in which the Bush Administration will spend the months beforehand amassing a quarter of a million troops on an enemy's borders. Doing it that way gives the enemy too long to enlist his own forces — the Western media, the UN and the moth-eaten French pantomime mule of Messrs Chirac and de Villepin. All these parties are dedicated to ensuring that even when the Americans win, they lose. The speed with which they've managed to taint victory in Iraq is impressive, though it bears no relation to anything so tiresome as reality. So from hereon in engagements in the war of terror will be swift, sudden and as low-key as can be managed. The US will depend not on multilateralism but bilateralism — the many agreements the Americans have signed for base rights and training missions and other below-the-radar stuff from the Middle East through old Soviet Central Asia to the Pacific. There will be, faute de mieux, a reliance on light and mobile configurations and special forces.

If you're an old-school imperialist such as myself, one might wish it were different. But America has not an imperialist bone in its body and, without it, long-term occupation, ever more confined to Iraq's "Green Zone" or Afghanistan's "crusader forts" (as an Aussie PM described the allied bases to me), is a fool's errand. So we have to figure out how to win with "light and mobile configurations".

Thus Trump these last two-and-a-half years: When he took the oath of office, the Islamic State was a nascent Saudi Arabia, bloodsoaked and oil-rich and merely awaiting diplomatic recognition. Month by month, he shrunk it, and reduced it from a caliphate back to a terrorist group - but without committing vast numbers of American infantrymen: low-key shock and awe. That culminated this weekend with a brilliantly executed raid on the holed-up Caliph - and with his head as a highly apt trophy of war.

With their usual unerring timing, NBC's "Saturday Night Live", winner of thirty-seven Emmies for Best Toothless Committee-Written Satire, opened this weekend with a sketch in which Trump's Syria pullout, widely derided by all sides in Washington, is credited with "bringing jobs back" ...for Isis. I wonder how many comic geniuses it took to come up with that rib-cracker.

Nevertheless, thanks to Trump (the real one, not Alec Baldwin), the leaden jest came true - at least in the sense that Isis now has an opening for Caliph, no previous experience required. For good measure, even as the President was giving that remarkable and masterful one-hour Sunday press conference, news came that the Islamic State's Number Two guy is unlikely to be promoted:

Likely Successor to Dead ISIS Leader Also Reported Killed