It wasn't long ago that President Obama boasted of getting Syria to surrender its chemical weapons without firing a shot. "It turned out that we are actually getting all the chemical weapons," Mr. Obama told the New Yorker last November. "And nobody reports that anymore."

But it turned out there was a good reason to hold the applause. On Monday the White House released a statement in the President's name celebrating the destruction of Bashar Assad's declared stocks of chemical weapons aboard the MV Cape...