The ambush of U.S. Special Forces (SF) in Niger — in which four soldiers were killed — was a small, deadly, and lamentable incident. The deaths have aroused a lot of debate and finger-pointing about why the SF unit was ambushed. Those involved in that debate — the Pentagon spokesmen, the media, senators, and congressmen — are all playing a game in which the goal is to find a palatable lie to tell the American people about why their soldiers were sent into a trap in which they died.

There is no need for an investigation, there is no mystery. The simple fact, which the president should share with the citizenry, is that the United States has no reliable ally anywhere in the Islamic world. U.S. Marines and soldiers will be killed in all Muslim countries where they are serving by the Islamists they are fighting, as well as by the Islamists who are members of the military and police forces they are sent to “train and assist.”

In addition, the local mujahedin in that country will be helped in planning their operations against U.S. forces by Islamists in the military, police, and intelligence services, in the civil service, as well as by private citizens and their Islamic clerics and scholars.

The bottom line? U.S. forces in Muslim countries — in Africa and all other regions — will be killed by those they are fighting, by those they are training and assisting, and by the growing numbers of Muslims who hate the presence of U.S. forces in their country, a hatred that will increase and take more tangible and lethal forms the longer U.S. forces remain in their country.