If we take "obliterate" literally, it means to cause to disappear.

The media seem to be overeager to undercut Trump's accomplishment by saying that he said the word "obliteration" but there's actually — possibly — something left. 

From this morning's news: "Trump reveals Israel sent agents to Iran’s bombed nuclear sites to confirm their 'total obliteration.'"

He seems determined not to abandon his word of choice, "obliteration."

How literally do we take "obliteration"? Really hardcore literalism would require that the thing be wiped from human memory. "Ob-" means against and "littera" means letter. Strike out the text. It's what Orwell's "memory hole" did. 

So how have we been using the word "obliterate" in recent years? Here's what I've noticed in the past 2 decades, just 11 examples taken from this blog's archive.

1. Quoting Hillary Clinton: "If [Obama] does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?"

2. Quoting Camille Paglia: "Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media...."

3. Quoting Trump: "As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)."

"This morning I ordered precision Military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia."

"These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States and our Allies. The strikes destroyed the caves they live in, and killed many terrorists without, in any way, harming civilians. Our Military has targeted this ISIS Attack Planner for years, but Biden and his cronies wouldn’t act quickly enough to get the job done. I did! The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that 'WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!'"

Writes President Trump, at X, just now. 

"Syrian rebels topple President Assad, his whereabouts unknown."

A terse headline at Reuters. 

Syria's army command notified officers on Sunday that Assad's rule had ended.... Assad, who has not spoken in public since the sudden rebel advance a week ago, flew out of Damascus for an unknown destination earlier on Sunday, two senior army officers told Reuters, as rebels said they had entered the capital with no sign of army deployments. His whereabouts now - and those of his wife Asma and their two children - remain unknown....

Thousands in cars and on foot congregated at a main square in Damascus waving and chanting "Freedom" from a half century of Assad family rule, witnesses said. The collapse followed a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East after many leaders of Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, a lynchpin of Assad's battlefield force, were killed by Israel over the past two months. Russia, Assad's other key ally, has been focused on the war in Ukraine....

The United States will continue to maintain its presence in eastern Syria and will take measures necessary to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Daniel Shapiro told the Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain's capital on Sunday. Before its defeat, Islamic State imposed a reign of terror in large swathes of Syria and Iraq....

Speaking of "whereabouts unknown"... where, if anywhere, is our President, the President of the United States?

Is Biden there at all?

Or is Trump already the acting President? No one stopped him from looking like the President yesterday at the French festivities.

If Trump is the relevant President, we already know his ostensible position on Syria: "THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT."

"The Return of Peace Through Strength/Making the Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy."

A column in Foreign Policy by Robert C. O'Brien, who "served as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021."

Trump was determined to avoid new wars and endless counterinsurgency operations, and his presidency was the first since that of Jimmy Carter in which the United States did not enter a new war or expand an existing conflict. Trump also ended one war with a rare U.S. victory, wiping out the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) as an organized military force and eliminating its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But unlike during Carter’s term, under Trump, U.S. adversaries did not exploit Americans’ preference for peace. In the Trump years, Russia did not press further forward after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Iran did not dare to directly attack Israel, and North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons after a combination of diplomatic outreach and a U.S. military show of force. And although China maintained an aggressive posture during Trump’s time in office, its leadership surely noted Trump’s determination to enforce redlines when, for example, he ordered a limited but effective air attack on Syria in 2017, after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against its own people....

Much more at the link. 

"The Islamic State, through an affiliated news agency, claimed responsibility on Friday for the attack."

"U.S. security officials said they believed it was carried out by a branch of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Khorasan, or ISIS-K, which has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. But there were some signs that Russia might try to pin blame for the attack on Ukraine, despite the claim of responsibility. The F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, issued a statement on Saturday saying that the attackers had planned to escape to Ukraine 'and had contacts on the Ukrainian side,' according to the Russian state media. Kyiv has denied any involvement and American officials have said there is no evidence that Ukraine played a role...."

The NYT reports on the Moscow concert hall attack.

"The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against innocent Israelis, the snuff films, mutilations and delight in simple cruelty, inspired immediate analogies to the Islamic State’s depredations."

"They also raised a question about Hamas’s strategy. Was this, as some averred, a desperate but calculated leap to barbarism, undertaken on the theory that only true grisliness would yield the kind of Israeli reaction required to scuttle peacemaking between Israel and its Arab neighbors? Or alternately, was it proof that Hamas had no normal strategic plan at all?... Radical movements are often multivalent, with ideologically motivated sadists and strategically minded gamblers converging on the same plan despite somewhat different self-understandings.... [A] movement deliberately going to extremes risks the Islamic State scenario, where you isolate yourself so completely that you end up first morally delegitimized and then cornered and destroyed.... But suppose that you light the match, you cross the line, you leave the civilized world behind, and a lot of your allies just … stay with you? Suppose you turn southern Israel into an abattoir and you don’t end up like the Islamic State thereafter? Suppose that, instead, most of your sympathizers just go to their usual corners, some making excuses and downplaying the violence, others committing fully to the glory of your cause?"

Writes Ross Douthat, in "The Victory Hamas Has Already Won" (NYT).

"Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, 45, blew himself up with his family, including four women and six children, rather than surrender to troops who landed by helicopter..."

"... and surrounded the house where he had been hiding, the president said.... [W]hen special forces commandos descended from Black Hawk helicopters guarded by Apache strike helicopters, things did not go entirely to plan, according to witnesses and Washington officials.... 'We heard the translator asking, via speakers, [for] the residents of the house to surrender and the women and children to leave before the attack started. The operation obviously didn’t go smoothly because it lasted for two hours and ended with bombing the house,' [a town resident] said.

"The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangahar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties."

Said Navy Capt. Bill Urban, a U.S. military spokesman, quoted in "U.S. says drone strike killed ISIS-K target as embassy warns Americans to leave airport 'immediately'" (WaPo).

Urban said the target was “an ISIS-K planner,” but did not say whether the person played a role in organizing or carrying out the airport attack.

I'll just do a survey: 

My confidence in the accuracy of this strike and this report about it is:

High

Low

Non-existent.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: My confidence in my own wording of this poll is low to non-existent. What "report" — Capt. Urban's or WaPo's?  I think WaPo has built in the doubt. And so, for that matter, has Capt. Urban, because he doesn't say why the person killed was the target, only that a person was killed and that person was the target. Were non-targets also killed? He doesn't say no. He says he doesn't know. Why doesn't he know? How do you know you surgically precisely got one imprecisely identified man, but you didn't hit anyone else? Oh, but he doesn't claim we didn't hit anyone else, just that they didn't hit anyone else that they knew to be civilians. 

"New York Times Admits Its ‘Caliphate’ Podcast Fell for ISIS Hoaxer’s Bullshit/HOOK, LINE, SINKER."

"The newspaper says it didn’t properly scrutinize the claims of Shehroze Chaudhry, who has since been charged with making up his terrorism past." 

Headline at The Daily Beast. 

The New York Times on Friday released the findings of its internal investigation into star reporter Rukmini Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS and extremism in the Middle East.... Callimachi came under intense scrutiny after the main subject of her Peabody award-winning podcast, titled Caliphate, was charged in Canada earlier this year with making up a terrorism hoax in which he claimed to have joined ISIS in Syria and have been a part of its brutal police force. Law-enforcement officials said that, in reality, Shehroze Chaudhry, better known by his alias Abu Huzayfah, lied about his exploits to the media, and had actually never traveled to Syria. His arrest immediately sparked questions at the Times, which through Callimachi’s reporting had leaned heavily on Chaudhry’s allegedly fabricated story.

ADDED: NPR has good detail:  

If I were going to vote for Donald Trump, these would be my top 2 reasons.

That's a post title that occurred to me as I was out on my morning run...



... by the end of the run, my list had increased to 4, but I'll just give you the original 2 for now:

1. He defeated ISIS! And he hasn't gotten us into any new military adventures.

2. The Trump haters have gone so big for so long that it feels like extortion. I instinctively resist bullying.

ADDED:

3. The Democrats have given us a ridiculous candidate, a sort of mystery box. I don't know what this entity is. Some composite of Democrats who will act through him?

4. The Democrats pressure us to follow orders from experts, not to understand the evidence and analysis. When it comes to questions involving race and gender — which seem to be all questions nowadays — they impose an ideological template about how the human mind works without regard for any scientific method of analysis. I'm afraid of this irrationality presented as lofty learning, especially as it comes with a demand that we shut up and take orders.

"God has honored us in the Islamic State to remove all of these idols and statues worshiped instead of Allah in the past days."

"Whenever we seize a piece of land, we will remove signs of idolatry and spread monotheism."

Statements from a video I blogged in 2015.

This was horrifyingly brutish to me at the time, but it feels lofty compared to what is happening in the United States in 2020.

"The Islamic State’s project to establish a proto-state and expand its domain across a broad swath of Iraq and Syria attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters from at least 80 countries..."

"Some security experts say it is crucial for countries to repatriate and prosecute their nationals if the jihadist movement is to be prevented from rising again. They add that due process also requires this. But the difficulties are many. Some governments don’t even know how many of their nationals are being held, who they are or how deeply they were involved in Islamic State atrocities. Many countries lack the laws to prosecute alleged fighters, and even if the laws are on the books, it is often unclear whether evidence from the battlefield would hold up in court. If they are convicted, they could radicalize others in custody and then be released after sentences as short as three years, leaving already overburdened police to keep unrepentant militants from turning to violence again. Western European countries, in particular, have been resistant to bringing the prisoners home, citing obstacles ranging from national security to domestic politics...."

From "After the Caliphate: Disarmed but not defused/The defeat of the ISIS caliphate left this Moroccan militant and about 2,000 other suspected foreign fighters detained in northeastern Syria. Will they pose a greater threat there or back in their home countries?" (WaPo).

"This is why [Macron] is a great politician, because that was one of the greatest non-answers I've ever heard. And that's okay."

Trump deploys a strategic, sarcastic compliment in the middle of a back-and-forth that you'll want to watch:

"I remember mom always telling me that all in all in the end the only one you really have is God. I have come to a place in experience where, in every sense of the word, I have surrendered myself to our creator."

"I DO NOT want the negotiations for my release to be your duty... know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I am doing."

Wrote Kayla Mueller, quoted in "Kayla Mueller was a U.S. hostage killed in ISIS custody. The raid against Baghdadi was named for her" (WaPo).

I was happy to see this article and this kind of strong, true religion in The Washington Post. But the article, which went up yesterday afternoon, is not on the front page at the website now and not on WaPo's most-read list.

And it's dispiriting that the top-rated comment — quoting Kayla's mother ("I still say Kayla should be here, and if [President Barack] Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been") — is:

Grief only excuses so much. Obama was not responsible for Kayla Mueller's death, either directly or through the sort of passivity her mother implies. Crediting the narcissistic, exploitative Trump with decisiveness is delusional.

There are many other comments in that vein, and I didn't read them all but I didn't see anything expressing awe at Kayla's saintly religious faith.

"The dog, whose name and breed remain unknown, chased Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into a tunnel and cornered him."

"With no place to go, the terrorist leader blew himself up along with three of his children, who he was using as human shields. The dog’s injuries highlighted the importance of military working dogs in special operations. Often, they will enter the danger zone with a camera on their backs before the humans do so. 'The dog is a war veteran and a valued member of the team,' a currently serving soldier assigned to Delta Force told the Washington Examiner.... Within the community, he says, 'The injury to the dog is an injury to one of us. These dogs are a special breed of courageous.'... The multipurpose canines, usually German shepherds or Belgian Malinois, are capable of a variety of tasks, including attacking the enemy and bomb-sniffing. They are often the first into the breach in a fight, giving them special significance among the special operations forces with which they operate.... Traditionally, the dogs hold the rank of a noncommissioned officer. They outrank their handlers as a way to prevent mistreatment, according to the U.S. Army...."

From "'Special breed of courageous': Delta Force operator hails valor of military dog wounded in Baghdadi raid" (Washington Examiner).

I was especially interested in "Often, they will enter the danger zone with a camera on their backs" because I'd just read — in The New York Times — "Watching the Raid Was Like a Movie, the President Said. Except There Was No Live Audio/Surveillance video provided a dramatic portrait of action outside the al-Baghdadi compound, but could not show what happened in an underground tunnel where the ISIS leader died. For that, Mr. Trump would have to hear from Delta Force, or their commanders." This seems designed to cast doubt on Trump's vivid description of Baghdadi's "screaming, crying and whimpering":

What the president saw, according to military and intelligence officials, was overhead surveillance footage on several video screens that, together, provided various angles from above, and in real time....

But those surveillance feeds could not show what was happening in an underground tunnel, much less detect if Mr. al-Baghdadi was whimpering or crying. For that, Mr. Trump would have had to have gotten a report from the commandos directly, or relayed up through their chain of command to the commander in chief.

9 paragraphs later, we get "It is not clear whether the dog that followed Mr. al-Baghdadi into the tunnel was wearing a body camera."

Washington Post headline: "Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State dies at 48."

Look at this, on the front-page at The Washington Post:


It's as though the paper is honoring him.

I wonder how long that will stay on the front page in that form. It's the teaser for obituary, and there is another article — to the left — about the military raid, "Trump says Islamic State leader Baghdadi blew himself up as U.S. troops closed in." Note how that forefronts Baghdadi's agency. He "blew himself up."

If you click through to the obituary, the headline is different — "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State’s ‘terrorist-in-chief,’ dies at 48." So that makes the form of the headline on the front page even more startling — "Austere religious scholar..."

The obituary has that "austere religious scholar" language in the first paragraph and proceeds to tell his story within that framework:

When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the reins of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2010, few had heard of the organization or its new leader, an austere religious scholar with wire-frame glasses and no known aptitude for fighting and killing....

[D]espite [ISIS]’s extremist views and vicious tactics, Mr. Baghdadi maintained a canny pragmatism as leader, melding a fractious mix of radical jihadists and former Iraqi Baathists and army officers into an effective military force. It was this combination of extremist ideology and practical military experience that enabled the group to seize and hold territory that would form the basis of a declared Islamic caliphate....

He graduated from the University of Baghdad in 1996 and received a master’s degree in Koranic recitation from the Saddam University for Islamic Studies in 1999.... By 2003, at age 31, he was well on his way to a doctorate and a shot at a full professorship. But after U.S. troops invaded Iraq that year, he signed up with a local resistance movement...

He was arrested in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 and, in a fateful turn, landed at the notorious and now-defunct Camp Bucca prison. The vast, U.S.-run detention facility warehoused nearly 26,000 Iraqi men at a time in communal tents, and U.S. military officials later acknowledged that it served at times as a recruitment and training center for jihadists.

“Extremists mingled with moderates in every compound,” Vasilios Tasikas, who served at the time as a Coast Guard lieutenant commander in charge of legal operations at the prison, wrote in a 2009 essay in the Military Review. Over time, he wrote, the mixing of hardened jihadists and Iraqi civilians “fueled the insurgency inside the wire.”...

[I]n 2014, Mr. Baghdadi... announc[ed] the founding of the caliphate... [with himself] as the living heir to the line of great warrior-emirs from Islam’s early history.

In his dress and movements, he symbolically evoked the prophet himself, from his black turban and robe to the traditional miswak, a carved wooden teeth-cleaning stick that Muhammad was said to have favored.

ADDED: The oldest comment at the WaPo obituary is:

Foreshadowing? (fingers-crossed)

President Trump “had run into a ‘dead-end tunnel’ before he ‘ignited his vest,’ killing himself and three of his children,

And that is followed by:

That would be too kind. Trump has earned public humiliation and global scorn. He deserves to suffer. Locked-in syndrome sounds appropriate. We can parade him around and pelt him with offal.

Incredible.

ADDED: They've changed it. As of 11:34 (CT), the front page teaser for the obituary is "Extremist leader of Islamic State dies at 48":

Al-Baghdadi died "like a dog," "like a coward," and “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way."

Said President Trump.

Trump's words and face were very expressive...

pic.twitter.com/7esnNSoa5D

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2019

Trump is still only teasing the "Something very big has just happened!".... but news reports say that our forces have killed al-Baghdadi .

Here's how it looks at Trump's Twitter page right now:



A pinned tweet. That's the tweet I called "Kind of disturbing actually" last night. Why "disturbing" when it suggests good news, doesn't it? I found it kind of disturbing because of the oddness of getting news this way — it's coy and it's social media. It feels like the way a friend might begin to tell us that she's fallen in love.

To my ear, the "has" gives it a special feeling. "Something very big has just happened," not "Something very big just happened." The "has" elevates it, makes it feel rather grand.

The NYT story at the moment is "Special Operations Raid Said to Kill Senior Terrorist Leader in Syria/The identity of the target was not confirmed, but President Trump was scheduled to make a statement on Sunday morning":

United States Special Operations commandos carried out a risky raid in northwestern Syria on Saturday against a senior terrorist leader there, two senior administration officials said late Saturday.

A senior American official said commandos and analysts were still seeking to confirm the identity of the terrorist, who the officials said was killed in the operation when he exploded his suicide vest.

But a person close to President Trump and a senior American official said that the target of the raid was believed to be the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A senior administration official said that the president had approved the mission....

That's the form and tone I'm used to reading when the news is serious.

This makes me think of something My name goes here wrote in the comments on last night's post:

In the "old" days an important announcement would be learned and then shared with favored journalists who would then tell all of the other journolists and they would get to be all smug and righteous when they, the favored few, would break the news about this developing story. They would lie to the audience that they are learning about this just now and they are sharing what they learn, then have 3 lined up "analysts" that already know the softball questions to expect to knit the narrative.

As long as Trump is president, it appears that those days are gone. Who did he tell first? Us. Tomorrow when the press carries whatever Trump's announcement is, they will be learning about it for the first time.

I like this. It pulls the Presidency into the 21st century.

I added the link to "journolists" to indicate that it's not a typo.

Will the next President talk to us like this? Trump's antagonists expect him to be gone and to stop occupying the position of President when he is not a real President. Only when he's gone will we see what the presidency has become. Will there be a reversion to the old form, or will the new President step into the new form of President created by Trump? I don't think we can go back, but I also think there can never be another Trump.

"Syria critic Lindsey Graham reverses stance, says Trump's policy could succeed."

Reuters reports.

“I am increasingly optimistic that we can have some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years if we play our cards right,” Graham said.

Graham said Trump was prepared to use U.S. air power over a demilitarized zone occupied by international forces, adding that the use of air power could help ensure Islamic State fighters who had been held in the area did not “break out.”...

Graham also said he believed the United States and Kurdish forces long allied with Washington could establish a venture to modernize Syrian oil fields, with the revenue flowing to the Kurds. “President Trump is thinking outside the box,” Graham said of Trump’s thinking on oil. “The president appreciates what the Kurds have done,” Graham added. “He wants to make sure ISIS does not come back. I expect we will continue to partner with the Kurds in Eastern Syria to make sure ISIS does not re-emerge.”

"Defense Secretary Mark Esper says that under current plans all U.S. troops leaving Syria will go to western Iraq and the military will continue to conduct operations against the Islamic State group to prevent its resurgence...."

"The developments made clear that one of President Donald Trump's rationales for withdrawing troops from Syria was not going to come to pass any time soon. 'It's time to bring our soldiers back home,' he said Wednesday. But they are not coming home.... While [Esper] acknowledged reports of intermittent fighting despite the cease-fire agreement, he said that overall it 'generally seems to be holding. We see a stability of the lines, if you will, on the ground.' He also said that, so far, the Syrian Democratic Forces that partnered with the U.S. to fight IS have maintained control of the prisons in Syria where they are still present. The Turks, he said, have indicated they have control of the IS prisons in their areas. 'I can't assess whether that's true or not without having people on the ground,' said Esper."

ABC News reports.

ADDED: Here's the full transcript of Esper's remarks.