“Be very glad we don’t have a Republican president,” Walter Russell Mead advises, for “if we did, we would be treated to a merciless media pounding … on the series of strategic failures, mistakes, and false starts that have characterized America’s war strategy in Afghanistan since 2009.” We would be treated to “constant reminders of how the president, who repeatedly said that this was a just war that America had to win … hasn’t managed to win it, or even end it,” and how the whole Middle East, relatively calm when Obama took over, is mired in chaos and blood.

He knows whence he speaks, as between 2001 and 2009 we did have a Republican president, whose mistakes in Iraq between 2004-2006 were lustily derided but whose successes between 2007-2008 were systematically ignored by the media. Once it became clear that the expected outcome — a colossal defeat, like Vietnam, only bigger — wasn’t about to occur, the media lost interest.