The Washington Post Tells Us ISIS Is Losing, Again

The Washington Post published some terrific news last Saturday:

The Islamic State’s recent defeats on the battlefield signal that its once-vaunted militia army has been hobbled by worsening money problems, desertions and a dwindling pool of fighters, analysts and monitoring groups say.

Before you break out the champagne, however, consider the fact that we have heard this before. And not only have we heard it before, but the Washington Post article then engages in revisionist media history:

Only a year ago, the Islamic State was seen as a juggernaut — rich, organized and fielding thousands of motivated fighters — that overran rival forces in Iraq and Syria with astonishing speed and brutality.

Actually, that’s not what the mainstream was telling us at all “only a year ago.”

In January 2015, The Atlantic announced:

ISIS Is Losing Its Greatest Weapon: Momentum: Evidence suggests that the Islamic State’s power has been declining for months.

A CNN headline asked in November 2014:

Has ISIS peaked? Terror Group Suffers Setbacks in Iraq.

CNN followed that a few weeks later with:

For ISIS, Tough Times as it Seeks to Regroup.

The New York Times announced on February 4, 2015:

ISIS Is Losing in Iraq.

On April 15, 2015, Vox issued its own report:

ISIS is Losing.

That was all about a year ago. But in this current Washington Post report, we hear that they’re losing now, and that a year ago they were “a juggernaut.”

The mainstream media was wrong then; they’re telling us the same thing now and pretending last year’s coverage never happened. Makes this new report hard to accept at face value.

Their new report also says:

U.S. military officials estimate that the group has lost as much as 40 percent of the territory it held in Iraq and as much as 20 percent in Syria. Kurdish and Arab forces, including Iraq’s increasingly competent military, have advanced against the group with the help of airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition.

Here again, this would be most welcome and encouraging news, were it not for the fact that the Pentagon was caught last April falsifying its maps of Islamic State territory to make the Obama airstrikes appear more successful than they really had been.

So what is really going on here? Why is the Washington Post and so much of the mainstream media so anxious to pronounce the Islamic State dead, when in fact no one has managed to dislodge the Islamic State from its main power centers in Iraq and Syria, and it is gaining ground in Libya?

The answer is not hard to fathom. The Washington Post and its cohorts today are essentially the Propaganda Ministry of the Democratic Party and of Barack Obama in particular. During his State of the Union address in January, Obama said:

For more than a year, America has led a coalition of more than 60 countries to cut off ISIL’s financing, disrupt their plots, stop the flow of terrorist fighters, and stamp out their vicious ideology. With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we’re taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, their weapons. We’re training, arming, and supporting forces who are steadily reclaiming territory in Iraq and Syria.

When the Post follows up on these declarations of success with a report about how the Islamic State is losing ground, it makes the president look good, and makes it more likely that more Democrats will be elected in his wake.

That’s what this is really all about. To get real news, you cannot turn to sources such as the Post and the New York Times and CNN any more. They all just reflect the liberal establishment line.

And today, that line is that the airstrikes are a tremendous success and that the Islamic State is losing.

The Islamic State lost the key Iraqi city of Ramadi recently. Might they really be approaching their end, if not as a jihad terror group, then at least as a putative caliphate? Well, the media wolf-crying makes it difficult, if not impossible, to tell for sure. This should serve as a caution for anyone who might still believe they can pick up the Washington Post and get anything approaching responsible journalism.