"It's very strange, and I cannot understand it."
- Ahmed Othman, commander of one U.S.-backed rebel group in Syria regarding U.S. policy

This wouldn't be the first time that America's foreign policy stopped making sense, but our current Syrian war strategy may have just hit a whole new level of stupid.

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

I'm sure that some apologist will manage some complicated mental gymnastics in order to rationalize this FUBAR, but I am incapable of imagining what it might be.

"It is an enormous challenge," said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as "a fairly new phenomenon."
"It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield," he said.

I believe that representative Schiff is 8 dimensions short on that metaphor.

Now if that was the full extent of our F'd up situation then that would be one thing. But it isn't.

The U.S. State Department does not want the government of Syria to defeat or weaken ISIS, at least not if doing so means any sort of gain for the Syrian government. Watching a recent video of a State Department spokesperson speaking on that subject might confuse some U.S. war supporters.

The Pentagon wants to defeat ISIS. The CIA wants to defeat Assad. The Obama Administration wants both things.
Well, you can't have both things. At least not without stuff like this.

It's not just ironic; it's a symbol of how disastrous the last 15 years of US Iraq policy have been, how circuitous and self-perpetuating the violence, that we are now bombing our own guns. Welcome to American grand strategy in the Middle East.

Stupid enough for you yet? It gets worse. Much worse.

A crucial problem in news media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been how to characterize the relationship between the so-called “moderate” opposition forces armed by the CIA, on one hand, and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front (and its close ally Ahrar al Sham), on the other. But it is a politically sensitive issue for US policy, which seeks to overthrow Syria’s government without seeming to make common cause with the movement responsible for 9/11, and the system of news production has worked effectively to prevent the news media from reporting it fully and accurately.
The Obama administration has long portrayed the opposition groups it has been arming with anti-tank weapons as independent of Nusra Front. In reality, the administration has been relying on the close cooperation of these “moderate” groups with Nusra Front to put pressure on the Syrian government....
For example, a dispatch from Aleppo last May in Al Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab), a daily newspaper financed by the Qatari royal family, revealed that every one of at least ten “moderate” factions in the province supported by the CIA had joined the Nusra-run province command Fateh Halab (Conquest of Aleppo).

So far the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have all cooperated in pushing out the patently false propaganda - that we aren't aiding the group responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans - and as long as the public doesn't pay attention, the government will get away with this deception.

Sometimes our Syrian policy has aided the 9/11 murderers in more direct ways.
For instance, when the Pentagon spent $41 million to train "four or five" Syrian fighters, but not before they handed over their weapons to al-Qaeda.

To be fair, this situation isn't so much "new" as just more obvious. The Assad government has had a lot of help from Iraqi Shia militias that travel to Syria to fight al-Nusra and ISIS.
In Iraq, these groups are our de facto allies, except when they threaten to kill us. In Syria they are our de facto enemies because they support Assad.
Which I'm sure totally makes sense in a way that I haven't grasped just yet.

Until I can grasp the 11th dimensional chess of this strategy, I'm sticking to something more basic.