State Department spokesman John Kirby is bragging up the US State Department’s sordid achievements of 2015, even things that they demonstrably never did. Key among those was the declaration from Kirby that the US brought “peace and security to Syria.”

The US has been bombing war-torn Syria for months, and ISIS controls around half of the nation’s territory, and the nation is shedding millions of refugees, who are fleeing anywhere and everywhere just to get out of the conflict.

Syria at this point seems to be the least peaceful place imaginable, and despite Kirby’s efforts to couch America’s involvement as a “humanitarian contribution,” it consists pretty much exclusively of arming some militant factions and bombing others,

Kirby went on to brag of the US “stepping up to aid the Syrian people during their time of need,” and taking credit for peace talks nominally set for next month, and which at this point don’t really have a set list of involved parties.

Ironically, the peace talks are the fruit of a Russian effort to get moderate rebels to talk with the Assad government, something the US had long resisted and openly opposed, and its contribution seems chiefly to be that they’ve finally gotten out of the way of it.