In years past I’ve spent several Fourth of July holidays in Washington, D.C. Aside from nearly insufferable heat and humidity, you are assured a world class fireworks show. A new normal, however, appears to have emerged this year with security ramped up wherever you turned. Cops were encamped on every corner. Three miles of chain link fencing had been erected in order to funnel the crowds through metal detectors before anyone set foot on the National Mall. Torrential rains in the morning and afternoon reduced lawns to muddy sponges so no one could sit on the grass. Nonetheless, thousands stood on the west steps for the annual Capitol Fourth concert and tens of thousands more crowded the reflecting pools between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial where the fireworks were launched.

Proving you don’t need terrorists to provide terror, a young man was stabbed to death on a Metro train Saturday afternoon when he refused to hand over his cellphone to an assailant believed to be under the influence of drugs. Forty revelers on their way downtown to attend the holiday festivities watched in horror as an attacker repeatedly stabbed Kevin Joseph Sutherland. He then turned his bloody knife on other passengers demanding money and collected several hundred dollars before bolting from the train at the next stop. Police identified the assailant within minutes because he dropped a book bag with an ID card during his escape. Jasper Squires, 18, is being held for murder and a long list of associated felonies. All this mayhem transpired during the three minutes that elapsed between subway stops.

Members of Congress left town for the Independence Day holiday, so staff on the Hill wore jeans and T-shirts to their offices on Monday. They were already looking forward to the August recess when their bosses will spend six weeks at home before returning to work in early September. Prior to the advent of air conditioning many embassies provided hardship pay to diplomats assigned to Washington, D.C. The sub-tropical summer climate, with temperature and humidity regularly above 90 degrees and 90 percent, is hard on Colorado natives. You start soaking your underwear well before 10 a.m., and mildew leaves stairs slippery, your sugar lumpy, your newspaper damp and your crackers limp. Even the gossip was stale.

I did have an interesting conversation with an old friend, a one-time Republican White House aide, whose take on ISIS opened my eyes. I expected him to hold a dim view of the Obama administration’s foreign policy competence, yet he was surprisingly forgiving. Not that his conclusions are encouraging. He argued that ISIS is a fully rational response to the vicious depredations of the Assad regime. Holed up behind his Alawite (Shiite) imperial guards in Damascus, Assad’s forces have engaged in the deliberate targeting of children, the elderly and pregnant women — dropping barrel bombs on hospitals, schools and bakeries — the intentional slaughter of civilians. While Western governments have expressed their desire to remove Assad, they have not taken the steps required.

“Assad and his 40,000 troops live on a single mountain top in Damascus — one large neighborhood. American air power could eliminate all of them in a single afternoon, if we wanted to,” my friend hypothesized. “With a million Syrians dead or wounded, another three million refugees sheltered in camps and the carnage continuing, why are we surprised that Sunnis have banded together to protect their own?” While ISIS has engaged in appalling excesses of its own, they pale in comparison with those of Assad. My friend believes there is nothing we can do to prevent young Muslim men and women from responding to appeals by ISIS for their help in reversing Sunni losses in Syria and Iraq. No amount of bombing seems to dissuade them from embracing holy war, which sounds a lot more exciting than sitting around unemployed in a European slum. His comments left me wondering whether we really recognize the bad guys. There’s a reason why Israeli troops are welcoming Syrian refugees, feeding them, treating their wounds and providing them safe passage into Jordan, when they could be turning them away.

— Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former state legislator. He can be reached at mnhwriter@msn.com.