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Obama Administration Boasts As ISIS Grows Deadlier

The three Brussels suicide bombers, pictured on surveillance video shortly before their carnage last month, serve as a reminder that battlefield successes touted by the Obama administration are not stopping ISIS from expanding its terrorist threat within Western borders. (AP)

Islamic State: The Obama Administration crows that ISIS membership and territory has shrunk, but the Brussels and Istanbul attacks illustrate its advances in Europe and elsewhere. Scoring PR points doesn't protect the homeland.

You would think it was VT Day -- Victory Over Terrorists -- the way the Obama administration, in its final lame-duck year, describes the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh.

Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday boasted to Congress that "we have taken back 40% of the territory that Daesh controlled a year ago in Iraq and 10% in Syria," adding that as to operatives, “we assess Daesh’s numbers are the lowest they've been since we began monitoring their manpower in 2014.”

The "we're winning" message was also delivered by the president himself on Fox News Sunday, when he was reminded of his recent Atlantic magazine interview, in which it was noted that "Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do."

President Obama's response was: "there isn't a president who's taken more terrorists off the field than me, over the last seven-and-a-half years ... this is my number one job and we have been doing it effectively."

That gives no solace to the families of the 130 victims of November's Paris ISIS attacks, or the 32 victims of last month's Brussels attacks. They weren't slaughtered on "the field" the president is talking about.

Unlike al-Qaida, which conducted the Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks, ISIS, largely an al-Qaida spinoff, is a terrorist group that occupies a large span of territory over which it claims sovereignty, and it wages conventional battlefield war to retain and expand that territory. Short-term victories over ISIS in that war are not victories over ISIS's ability to launch terrorist attacks abroad, using some of its thousands of European recruits.

As if on cue after the boasts from Obama's State Department, ISIS on Wednesday declared that "Paris was a warning, Brussels a reminder." The new issue of ISIS's "Dabiq" propaganda magazine promised that "it is only a matter of time -- after as many blessed operations as Allah facilitates for His soldiers in their lands -- before the crusaders’ resolve dissipates and they fall at the feet of the invading lions, appealing for amnesty and begging to pay jizyah," i.e. the tax historically levied by Muslim states on Christians and other "dhimmī" living under Muslim rule.

The New York Times' front page on Tuesday reported that "the battlefield successes enjoyed by Western-backed forces in the Islamic State’s heartland have done little to stop the expansion of the militants to Europe, North Africa and Afghanistan."

With the $1 billion it has grabbed thanks to its control over so much Iraqi and Syrian territory, a direct result of President Obama's withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, ISIS can easily finance elaborate secret operations in Europe and elsewhere in the free world.

The details emerging about the 29-year-old Parisian computer technician who oversaw the ISIS Paris attacks, for instance, are blood curdling.  Reda Hame joined ISIS just the week before beginning the operation, and his weapons training took just days of practice in a park.

President Obama's attitude is "to communicate" to ISIS that "you can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you," and after terrorist actions take place, "we’re going to go to a ballgame. And do all the other things that make our life worthwhile."

He calls it "the message of resilience that we don’t panic, that we don’t fear." But that's not resilience. It's complacency.