It was equal parts ironic and tragic watching US Secretary of State John Kerry testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee this week, as he shamelessly made the case for a war without end against Isis. It was the same place he sat 43 years ago, as a young soldier, bravely and eloquently calling for an end to American fighting in Vietnam, his generation’s endless war – the same war that led to Congress passing the War Powers Resolution, the law the Obama administration has now decided it can completely disregard.

As with much of the White House’s secret and possibly illegal march back to Iraq and beyond, almost every aspect of Kerry’s testimony on Wednesday was riddled with holes. The Obama administration’s case for intervention begins and ends with the fantastical idea that it thinks it can use a law passed 13 years ago – before Isis even existed, and meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 – to start a war that White House officials freely admit will last for years, yet is aimed at a group that virtually all intelligence analysts agree is not an imminent threat to the United States.

Exactly how the administration thinks it can manage to go to war without getting Congress to vote on it is so perplexing, apparently they can’t even figure it out. Last week, “a senior administration official” floated the idea to the New York Times that the White House was claiming authority to wage war on Isis based on the Iraq War Resolution from 2002 – the very statute the Obama administration wanted to repeal just a year ago. But this week, with the Pentagon and Congress knocking, it seems Team Obama has abandoned that premise for going to war and returned to one of its initial justifications: the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that declared war on “those nations, organizations, or persons responsible for 9/11”.

Whatever the administration’s tortured and torture architect-approved logic for combatting Isis, they’ve made one thing clear: the American public aren’t allowed to see it. While they have announced that we are literally going to war for years, the government has so far refused to release any written analysis as to why it is apparently legal.

Kerry was certainly open to the idea of Congress exercising its constitutional obligation to declare war: “We know you are thinking about retooling the AUMF. And we welcome – we would like Congress – please do this,” he told the Senators. The Secretary of State then added: “We’re not going to make our actions dependent on it happening.”

In other words: Please give us authority to wage war. If you don’t, we’re going to do it anyways.

Not that Congress is innocent here. Both the House and Senate are so terrified to actually vote on whether we go to war that they promptly ended their fall session more than a week early so they could go home and campaign for the midterm elections free of any and all responsibility for the brewing foreign policy disaster they are facilitating.

Meanwhile, in less than a week, the administration’s position has gone from “absolutely no ground troops, period” to “well, actually….” Two top generals, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Martin E Dempsey and Army chief of staff Ray Odierno, both said this week that they believe ground troops will be necessary to complete the objectives laid out by the administration. The White House quicking started spinning: Odierno was referring to other foreign ground troops and the Dempsey was referring to “hypothetical scenarios”. But the rift between the generals and White House only seems to be widening.

The White House later said that Obama may “forward deploy” those “military advisers” – now numbered at 1,600 – already on the ground in Iraq. Every time I hear the phrase “military advisers”, I am reminded of this tweet from journalist DB Grady:

You'd swear they carry briefcases and wear business suits. More accurate: OBAMA SENDS BATTALION OF COMMANDOS TO IRAQ pic.twitter.com/AGLkj6HkXC — David W. Brown (@dbgrady) June 20, 2014

Beyond “military advisers”, contractors are set to start pouring into Iraq as well: as the Daily Beast reported, contracting companies – aka the same type of mercenaries who helped make the last Iraq war such an unmitigated disaster – think going back to Iraq is their “next big meal ticket”. Just don’t call them “boots on the ground”.

The only argument weaker than the administration’s strategy for Iraq War III is its theory on the war’s other front in Syria. Before Congress fled the Capitol so abruptly, they voted overwhelmingly to arm and train the Syrian rebels. One minor point that was largely left out of the debate: we already have been arming the rebels for months – we’ve just been doing it covertly, and so far that effort has ended in utter failure.

It’s no secret that the CIA has been arming and training the Free Syria Army, and it’s also not disputed that many of the CIA-facilitated weapons they have received are now in the hands of Isis. Even the CIA admits this, yet it’s almost been ignored in the debate. The Huffington Post reported that some in the CIA have been pushing for the US to make a secret pact with Bashar al-Assad, the same dictator we almost went to war with a year ago – the same man who has suddenly stepped up his country’s ferocity of attacks on the US-backed rebels, ahead of the expected air campaign.

The potential chaos that the US could soon be contributing to in Syria was documented in a harrowing report this week by the Guardian’s Martin Chulov on the Syrian city of Raqqa, where residents despise Isis, hate Assad even more, and are now also living in constant terror of what US airstrikes will do to the large civilian population.

By the way, has the United States arming rebel groups ever turned out for the better? We can look no further than the war we’ve been waging for the last 13 years, against a group of terrorists we once thought of as guerrilla freedom fighters who, a long time ago in a country not so far away, we also considered our allies.

Hey whatever happened to those rebels we trained and armed in Afghanistan a few decades back — Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 17, 2014

Yes, remember when we trained and armed the mujahideen to draw the Russians into an Afghanistan version of our Vietnam War? How did that turn out?