An Umbrella Won't Help

     There are credible reports of high-ranking U. S. officers describing the current situation in the Middle East,* including U. S. involvement, in terms that are, how to put it, distinctly not military.

     Nope, they've been speaking of it in religious terms, and I don't mean the Sermon on the Mount.  I take offense at this -- not at their belief, but at applying it to their jobs in that way.  Even if they were right -- and I don't have an inside line, or any certainty that anyone else does -- it's not their job.  It's not the job of their troops.  Mere humans don't get to put a thumb on those scales, one way or another, and our secular Constitutional republic is not in the "Holy War" business.  Shut up and soldier. 

     As a general reminder, various preachers in the West have been talking up Armageddon any time war flares in the Middle East since at least World War One and the upshot has always been that the war came and went and their coffers were all the richer, every time -- but the sky never did split, and the official word is still, "No man knows the hour."  You can look it up for yourself, which I think was one of the points of the Protestant Reformation.
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* Various news organizations are nudging journalists that "Ayatollah" is not a political office but a religious title and there are plenty of them; the late Ali Kamenei's political title was "Supreme Leader."  The same memos point out that what's going on right now does not count as a U. S. war unless Congress declares it, which must be a huge comfort to the dead of this and the many other undeclared conflicts we've waged.