Secretary of Defense James Mattis really unnerves the media. He doesn’t want to merely “degrade” ISIS, as President Obama stated. Mattis wants to take them out — forever. So does President Trump.

In order to accomplish this, the President recently relinquished his authority on troop levels in the Middle East to General Mattis:

That makes many in the media queasy. For example, the Washington Post complained, “A military policy run solely by the Pentagon creates confusion.”

Nonsense, says military historian Victor Davis Hanson. He cites the examples of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and their reliance on their generals to achieve victory. Moreover, Hanson points out that “the U.S. military can drop a huge bomb on the Taliban, strike the chemical weapons depots of Syria’s Bashar Assad, or choose the sort of ships it will use to deter North Korean aggression — without Mr. Trump poring over a map. . .”

Let’s let General Mattis explain his strategy, shall we?

“We’re going to clean them out.” Sounds good to me, but the media prefer the old Obama-method of “patience,” pin-prick air strikes, and denying that ISIS is a threat to the US. And furthermore, ISIS is “not Islamic.”

Obama seemed to running his ISIS campaign from the State of Denial. The media are worried that Mattis’s strong hand will lead to a State of Confusion.

Mattis, however, is working in a State of Reality. When addressing graduating West Point Cadets last month, Mattis told the young officers:

“Manchester’s tragic loss underscores the purpose of your years of study and training at this elite school … We must never permit murderers to define our time or warp our sense of normal. This is not normal.”

No, it’s not. Nor should it be our “new normal.”

Let’s put it another way. If you were to suddenly find an infestation of cockroaches in your house, would you want to just “degrade” them with “air strikes” of Raid? Or would you want to call in the Big Guns, like an exterminator?

In the same way, think of ISIS as cockroaches and Gen. Mattis as the exterminator. He’s just the man we need to annihilate them.