Get that? After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane.

Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?