Here's the final proof that our foreign policy of global meddling has gone off the deep end: the two Syrian factions we are subsidizing are now battling one another. The latest iteration of the "moderate" Islamist jihadists we've been backing recently engaged in a pitched battle with the Kurdish "People's Protection Units" (YPG). Both are recipients of US tax dollars and the Kurds have the luxury of US "advisors" embedded in their ranks.

In effect, one branch of our gargantuan national security bureaucracy is conducting a proxy war against another branch – and if that doesn't underscore how irrational and out of control our foreign policy mandarins are, then I don't know what will.

The civil war in Syria, which was started by Islamists, and actively encouraged by longstanding US efforts to overthrow strongman Bashar al-Assad, has no "good guys." The Islamists — gathered together in a bewildering and ever-shifting array of alliances and "united fronts" — are head-chopping totalitarians who want to create an Islamic state: their only difference with the ISIS-inspired "Islamic State" is over tactics, and which gang of thugs gets to be kings-of-the-mountain. They are supposedly fighting ISIS, but most of their efforts seem to be directed at toppling Assad and destroying the last secular outposts in Syria.

And the Kurds are no angels, either. In spite of their lionization by the left-leaning media, the YPG is the Syrian branch of a terrorist organization known as the Kurdish Workers Party, which has carried out deadly attacks on civilian targets in Turkey. Furthermore, they are not exactly liberal democrats: they ruthlessly suppress any and all internal opposition, forcing noncombatants to join their ranks, recruiting child soldiers, and  kidnapping and murdering Arab activists. Territory under their control is subject to the ethnic cleansing of non-Kurdish residents, especially Arabs.

Why are we backing any of these groups?

The ostensible reason is the necessity of fighting our never-ending "war on terrorism," and yet we are protecting if not actively backing the very terrorist group whose attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon inaugurated this dark chapter in our history: Al Qaeda.

This is incredibly hard for ordinary Americans to process: indeed, it seems completely unbelievable. And yet it's true, as this report from the Washington Post on the progress of efforts to initiate a ceasefire in the Syrian civil war makes all too clear:

"One of the many problems to be overcome is a differing definition of what constitutes a terrorist group. In addition to the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, Russia and Syria have labeled the entire opposition as terrorists.