The big news out of Syria over the past couple of days has been that Syrian government forces with the help of the Russian military have taken back control of Palmyra from ISIS. The fall of Palmyra and subsequent destruction of the spectacular Roman ruins there by ISIS horrified the civilized world. The US government had claimed from the beginning that the Russians were not targeting ISIS at all, but only the "moderate" rebels supported by Washington. That lie now stands bare in newly-liberated Palmyra and onward, as Syrian government troops aided by the Russians speed east toward the "capital" of the Islamic State, Raqqa.

Meanwhile, the five year US "regime change" effort in Syria chugs along in a very different way. We learned in a Los Angeles Times report yesterday that the US is now at war with...itself in Syria.

Yes, that's right. While Syrian government troops and the Russians are dealing a death-blow to ISIS in Syria, one set of rebels supported by the Central Intelligence Agency is at war with another set of rebels supported by the Pentagon!

Apparently for the past several months CIA-backed Fursan al Haq and Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have intensified their war against each other. According to the Times piece, US Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) -- a staunch interventionist -- finds the situation "an enormous challenge," adding that "it is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield.”

Schiff here epitomizes the total cluelessness of the Washington political class. It is not a challenging situation nor is it three-dimensional chess to those capable of non-Washington thinking. It is a matter of US policy being to wage war against both the Assad government and Assad's main enemy, ISIS. When you fight an enemy and the enemy of that enemy at the same time it is not called three-dimensional chess. It is called madness.

If Euripides is correct that "whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad," it seems we are half-way to destruction in the US.