But while the U.S. was on temporary holiday from Iraq, Obama chose to pursue his own surge strategy in Afghanistan, sending 30,000 more troops into what has been the longest military engagement in American history. Now Obama is bringing them out again as part of his plan to completely wind down the war by the end of his presidency. And yet Afghanistan looks almost no different than it did when Obama took office. The U.S. and the personnel it trained act as a kind of guard for the capital city of Kabul, but the Taliban is still able to fire rockets at parliament and disappear back into the countryside. The Taliban’s attacks still come in a long seasonal wave, and are returning again this year, like clockwork.

Then there’s Saudi Arabia. Obama has advertised over and over again his frustration with the country, our longtime ally and the traditional counterweight to Iran in the region. And yet the U.S. government persists in doing a great deal of logistical work helping Saudi Arabia conduct a brutal and dishonorable war in neighboring Yemen. Obama used to worry aloud, as a constitutional scholar, about the executive branch’s runaway war powers, but the war that the United States is helping Saudi Arabia conduct in Yemen is barely even discussed in the media, let alone by the American people and their representatives.

What about Libya? After the U.S. spent a decade knocking over governments in the Middle East and reaping the Islamist whirlwind, you’d think the Obama administration would have learned its lesson. But the wise men in the White House still convinced themselves to try, try again and help topple Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya in 2011. That country has ever since struggled to field a legitimate-looking government and is now home to a colonial outpost for ISIS.