There is a certain grim elegance to the way empires manage their decline, a sort of bureaucratic shuffle that mimics progress while achieving absolutely nothing. It is the geopolitical equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, if the deck chairs were actually thousands of radicalized insurgents and the iceberg was the crushing inevitability of history. The latest act in this theater of the absurd comes courtesy of the United States military, which has decided that the solution to the looming catastrophe in northeastern Syria is not a coherent strategy, but rather a trucking company.

According to the latest dispatches from the front lines of futility, the United States has begun the transfer of some 150 Islamic State detainees from Syria to Iraq. This, we are told, is merely the amuse-bouche; the main course could involve shifting as many as 7,000 of these unfortunate souls across the border. The reasoning is as tragic as it is predictable: the Kurdish-led forces, those perennial tools of Western convenience who are currently being discarded like single-use plastic, are losing control of the region to the Syrian government. As the regime in Damascus reasserts its dominion, the Americans have realized that leaving thousands of ISIS fighters in a power vacuum might be slightly untidy. Thus, the great migration begins.

One must pause to admire the sheer intellectual bankruptcy required to view Iraq as the 'secure' holding pen for Islamic State militants. History, it seems, is not just ignored in Washington; it is actively mocked. To move detainees from the chaos of Syria to the fragile, sectarian tinderbox of Iraq is a masterstroke of irony that only a committee of Pentagon strategists could devise. It assumes that Iraq, a nation that has spent the last two decades serving as the primary incubator for the very ideology these detainees subscribe to, is now the ideal custodian for them. It is akin to solving a hoarding problem by moving your pile of old newspapers into a room full of kerosene and lit matches.

But let us not get bogged down in the terrifying reality of the destination; let us instead marvel at the process. There is something deeply European, almost Kafkaesque, about the logistics of terrorism management. One imagines the paperwork involved in transferring 7,000 holy warriors. The manifests, the headcounts, the likely disputes over jurisdiction—it turns the apocalypse into a DMV queue. The banality of evil has been replaced by the banality of administration. The West has long given up on actually solving the root causes of extremism in the Levant. That would require history books, cultural literacy, and a span of attention longer than an election cycle. Instead, we have settled for warehousing the symptoms. We treat captured combatants not as human beings or even as enemy soldiers, but as toxic waste—hazardous material to be shipped across borders until it becomes someone else’s ecological disaster.

The backdrop to this logistical farce is the return of the Syrian government to the northeast. After years of civil war, proxy skirmishes, and the grand posturing of Western powers demanding regime change, the result is a quiet acquiescence to the old order. The Americans are packing up their human cargo because the landlord is coming back to the building. It is a tacit admission that the grand experiment has failed. The Kurds, having served their purpose as the boots on the ground against the Caliphate, are now watching their prisoners being carted off by the very allies who are abandoning them. It is a betrayal so routine in the annals of Great Power politics that it barely registers as a scandal anymore; it is simply standard operating procedure.

And what of the 7,000? This number is tossed around with the casual indifference of a corporate downsizing report. Seven thousand men, steeped in the most violent ideology of the century, currently in limbo. Moving them to Iraq does not neutralize the threat; it merely changes the area code of the inevitable prison break. We have seen this play before. We know the script by heart. The prisons of Iraq are not oubliettes where problems disappear; they are universities where the next generation of insurgents earn their doctorates. By shifting this population from the chaotic custody of a collapsing Kurdish administration to the precarious custody of Baghdad, the United States is essentially seeding the ground for the sequel to a war they claim to have finished.

In the end, this transfer is a perfect microcosm of modern interventionism. It is motion without movement. It is a frantic activity designed to look like a solution, masking the deep, hollow silence where a strategy should be. The West cannot fix Syria, it cannot stabilize Iraq, and it certainly cannot extinguish the ideology of the Islamic State. So, it drives trucks across the desert, shuffling bodies from one side of an arbitrary line in the sand to the other, hoping that if they keep the pieces moving fast enough, no one will notice that the game was lost long ago.