"Oh! what a lovely war ..."

Homage to past glories on our national day.

Since we're celebrating "rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air" today, it seems like a good moment to check in on our wars. It's not a pretty picture.

Bombs have sure been bursting in Istanbul, in Dhaka, and in Baghdad.

Our governments (I'll include among that "us"not just U.S. allies, but also governments at the scenes of carnage) blame ISIS. And I don't think ISIS is denying authorship of these horrors.

Peter Beinart points out the killers are not without pretexts for their atrocities, even though there is no excuse for random murder.

The mid-20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that, “America was menaced as much by its own pretensions to virtue as it was by world disorder.” Niebuhr was no pacifist, nor did he draw a moral equivalence between the U.S. and Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR. But he urged American leaders to acknowledge that even in just wars, “tyranny [is] defeated with instruments tainted by evil.”

The United States has intervened militarily to prevent ISIS from conquering Iraq and Syria. In that effort, it has carried out more than 10,000 air strikes—strikes that kill many people but go largely unnoticed in the American press. America’s current war may be justified. But America is not innocent. By pretending it is, [Marco] Rubio and other politicians [including Ms. Clinton] mislead Americans about the reasons for ISIS terrorism. And they prevent an honest debate about the costs and benefits of America’s war.

We would rather look away, but we could do with some reminding. The Soufan Group says ISIS is being defeated militarily, but that only points to more suffering and butchery.

Over the past two years, the West has focused on this phenomenon: the persistent and rising threat of attacks such as those in Istanbul, Paris, Tunis, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Orlando, altering policies, laws, and tactics. As the Islamic State enters its third year as a self-proclaimed caliphate, this phenomenon—in which the Islamic State inspires people around the world to act in its name—has completely detached itself from the physical group. This threat to the West will remain, and perhaps grow, as the group suffers increasing losses on the ground. 

But to the millions of Syrians and Iraqis who experience the Islamic State less as a phenomenon and more as a daily existential threat, the announcement of a caliphate was the weary culmination of a long-term corrosion of governance and stability. Life in Raqqa, Mosul, Fallujah, and many other cities and villages was dreadful in the years before the announcement and remains dreadful two years on. Only in the West did the events of June 2014 come as a surprise. 

... As Syria and Iraq mark the second anniversary of the Islamic State, there is reason to hope that a third will not come; however, there is little reason to hope that the group will not re-emerge in some shape or form in the future. The scale of the problem in Iraq—and, even more so in Syria—is beyond comparison and beyond the current capabilities of local, regional, and international actors to resolve. 

Meanwhile, we've got 51 State Department officials calling for deeper U.S. dabbling in the Syrian civil war. Nothing in likely-President Hillary Clinton's past or present pronouncements suggests she knows better. In fact she'd likely embroil us all more deeply. (And yes, we do have to elect her; this is no time for purism.) And then comes word that the Syrian faction allied with al Qaeda has captured the leader of a U.S.-favored "moderate" combatant group -- and presumably all those lovely weapons we've sent him.

Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum got it right when contemplating our leaders' prescriptions:

This stuff never stops. Everyone wants a miracle cure in the Middle East: the mythical "just right" military response that doesn't involve ground troops; won't get any Americans killed; and doesn't take very long — but that will be magically effective anyway. It's nuts. ... It's snake oil.

Very deadly snake oil, mostly for other people.