From Afghanistan to Syria, the definition of insanity

The irony was painful -- and at the time we didn't even know the half of it.

I'm talking about the U.S. reaction to that airstrikes that Russia recently launched in Syria -- either against ISIS (if you believe Putin, in which case I want to speak with you after the blog post about the possibility of selling you this valid deed I have for the Brooklyn Bridge) or against U.S.-trained-and-backed Syrian rebels, and on behalf of Putin's mass murdering pal, Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.

The nation that has dropped countless bombs across the Arab world from Afghanistan to Africa, from airplanes and from drones, including about 5,000 warheads against suspected ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq in just the last year, is now worried that Russia dropping bombs in roughly the same corner of the world could lead to serious unintended consequences. In a statement released through Turkey last week, a coalition of allies warned that the Russian bombing raids were already harming civilians and "will only fuel more extremism and radicalization."

As that was being posted, some 1,600 miles or so to the east, American bombs were killing civilians in an outrageous attack on an international hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan -- a tragedy that almost certainly will fuel more extremism and radicalization.

There is so much that is so wrong with the deadly attack on the Doctors Without Borders -- better known around the globe as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF -- medical facility in northern Afghanistan that it is hard to know where to start. There is the fact that MSF shared the coordinates of its hospital -- one of the few places left treating people in that war-torn region -- with America and its allies days before the attack in an effort to prevent what happened anyway. Or that fact that U.S. forces continued to drop waves of deadly firepower on these selfless international doctors and nurses and their innocent patients for more than a half hour after MSF pleaded with them to stop. Or the mealy-mouthed way in which the American media covered what was clearly a horrific act carried out by the American military., as well as the ways the the military's story of who ordered the bombing and why a hospital was struck has already changed multiple times.

What is clear -- this incident is what our would-be future president Joe Biden might call a BFD. MSF is an outfit that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for its work among the sick and the destitute in some 20 war zones around the world, a tally that has only grown in the 16 years since then. Now, the bombs from the most powerful military force in the history of humankind have slaughtered 22 people, including not just doctors and staff but three children.

In the last day, there's been a growing debate over the head of MSF's allegation that the U.S. bombing amounted to "a war crime." I don't want to dismiss that issue -- it's important that U.S. policy overseas is not just effective but also moral -- but I think there's an even bigger question that flows from the tragedy in Kunduz:

What the hell are we doing?

This news from Afghanistan is especially jarring because -- as you may have forgotten, since it's hard to keep up with America's various military entanglements -- U.S. combat operations in that South Asian nation were supposed to have, ahem, ended last year. The role of our diminished force that still remains in Afghanistan is supposed to be advising and training the regular government troops -- but so often our "advice" still comes at the tip of a Hellfire missile.

And while the American public is left in the dark about what really is being done in our name over there -- at least until we kill some Nobel Peace Prize winners -- there isn't much of a peep here in the "homeland," because we are so used to this. The endless Global War on Terror™ that Congress wittingly or unwittingly approved in 2001 and which apparently will never be repealed or altered has been used to justify dropping bombs in more than a half dozen different countries, killing some terrorists but also a boatload of innocent civilians.

And how is that working out, exactly? In almost every country that we've touched, we've traded despicable despots -- like Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gadhafi -- for a grim landscape of car bombings, bloodshed, and chaos, and that's at best. At worst -- that would be Syria -- we now have all the chaos AND yet the despot, Assad, is still there. To show the bankruptcy of our policy in the region, just a few years ago President Obama was seemingly hours away from going to war against Assad, a move which -- based on what we know now -- might merely have given more power to the nightmarish thugs of ISIS. Now we're fighting ISIS -- dropping those 5,000 bombs over Syria and ISIS-controlled parts of Iraq -- and the usual band of neocons  in Washington are still clamoring in the midnight hour for more, more, more.

For who? For what? It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. With the heartbreaking massacre in Kunduz, we can now officially declare American policy in the Middle East and South Asia to be completely bat-guano insane. Dropping bombs to support unreliable allies, and killing civilians in the process, has simply not worked.

How can sanity be restored? If there was an easy answer, I think someone would have discovered it by now. Broadly and strategically, we should a) attempt to broker a real, honest and lasting peace deal between Palestine and Israel, which would have other positive effects in the region b) related to that, build on the kind of diplomacy that led to the recent peace deal with Iran, a rare bright spot, and c) continue to eliminate any dependence on the region's fossil fuels -- although hopefully not through fracking but through more renewable energy, for the sake of the planet.

Until we get our own house in order, America won't have the moral standing to even criticize Putin and his looming bombing atrocities. How sad is that?