My column on the homepage today:

President Barack Obama has never donned a flight suit or made any showy jet landings, but he has been even more adamant about an illusory victory.
“Mission accomplished” has been his essential message about al-Qaeda for years. The terror group, according to the president, is “decimated,” “on the run,” “on the path to defeat.” The president spiked the football so many times, his arm must have been about to give out. He gave every indication that al-Qaeda was all but eliminated, except for some mopping-up operations.
And now here we are launching what is projected to be a years-long bombing campaign against an al-Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State, which controls territory roughly equal to Great Britain, and we are hitting a faction of al-Qaeda in Syria, the so-called Khorasan Group, that represented an “imminent” threat to the West. It raises the question: What happened to al-Qaeda’s being on the verge of defeat?