If this sounds familiar, it should. Tomorrow marks three years since the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which was followed by several days' worth of bizarre talk from the Obama Administration about the whole thing starting with a YouTube video. That was all complete garbage, of course, but they were desperate to pitch that narrative in order to protect the larger political narrative that Al Qaeda was on the run.
Three years later, it's now ISIS that represents the major threat, but the administration's stance is basically the same. They don't want to really fight, and in order to keep that approach politicallly plausible, they need to put forward a narrative that the enemy is on the run and we've got the upper hand.