Triumphalism is usually not wise, if only from a pragmatic point of view. The media had a field day when Bush unwisely allowed himself to be filmed speaking beneath a huge navy banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” Yet it was strangely quiet when a laughing Hillary Clinton once boasted of Qaddafi’s death — channeling Caesar’s veni, vidi, vici boast over the end of Pharnaces at Zela: “We came, we saw, he died.” Or when we heard ad nauseam from Joe Biden and others that “GM’s alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.” In comparative terms, bombing a fleeing and forsaken Qaddafi or even taking out an isolated Osama in his compound may prove far less difficult than dealing with what is rising in the Middle East after the Arab Spring, what emerges from Syria, and what Iran becomes within a year or so. I would cool all this “spike the ball rhetoric,” and quietly carry an even bigger stick, because there is a lot going down abroad within the year.