I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear.

Veteran national security reporter Jonathan Landay and former Marine Captain and Foreign Service Officer Matthew Ho on the New War in the Middle East.

Is this really our model for the Middle East that we are going to bomb countries continuously take part

in civil wars, sometimes supporting one side, maybe supporting the other, with no means or

no real desire or effort to achieve a peace. We keep finding ourselves trapped in this endless cycle,

but perhaps that's the curse of being the country that we are,

the country we have been since World War I. As much as President Obama wishes we weren't

the world's policemen, perhaps we are. Thanks for joining us.

Here we go again. Over 23 years, four consecutive presidents have ordered the bombing of Iraq by U.S. forces.

It's what one of my guests calls the nightmare of Groundhog Day, facing the same problem over and again.

Just a year ago, Barack Obama told the United Nations that he was determined to end America's perpetual

war footing in the Middle East region. But this week, the president returned to the UN to announce

not yet and to assert that the U.S. intends to unleash more air power to defeat the Islamic

militants who swept across large areas in Iraq and Syria. With the first round of

drones and missiles unleashed inside Syria even before he spoke at the UN, the president

has plunged America into the midst of a civil war that involves over 1,000 different militia.

You need a mighty big scorecard just to figure out who's on

whose side. We've asked a couple of experienced hands to help us do just that. Jonathan Landay

is a senior national security and intelligence reporter from McClatchy newspapers. He's also

an unsung hero of Washington journalism. During the build-up to the 2003 invasion

of Iraq, Landay and his colleague Warren Strobel, Doug Deep, defined evidence refuting the Bush

administration's case for going to war. You can see Landay and Strobel at work in our documentary

...