Obama and Hillary Clinton gave dueling interviews in which they publicly split on whether the security and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria could have been avoided if the United States had played a larger role.
This statement is kind of a 'wash' by all sides. If you look at everything closely, you'll find that the same # of people would have died no matter what we did.
We COULD have intervened "more"...but because of the actions of a certain idiot CIC (Bush) we didn't have the resources available to invade Syria in force, which is what would have been the way to prevent the current massacre. HOWEVER, given what happened in Iraq, an UN-US interventions/invasion would probably have caused a smaller number, but still egregious number of casualties. Plus, there were protests from Syrians for us to NOT invade, so the US listened. And now some of them are mad at us (and want to attack us) because we didn't go after Assad with air strikes or special forces. Obama, Assad, and Putin did work together to dispose of the chemical weapons, so we got what WE wanted most. Regime change is a different story, which thanks to foreign fighters, doesn't seem like a good deal anymore. It's like The American Revolution, only King George is supported by Ivan the Terrible, the rebels are supported by Napoleon, and a bunch of weirdos are showing up from Texas supported by Atilla the Hun and Dracula-literally because a few of them are eating hearts to impress their oil baron donors in Saudi.
Iraq would still have had another Sunni uprising thanks to the actions of Maliki (attacking protesters, not listening to the UN, etc). So, 4 years on from 2010, we would still find ourselves in this situation, fighting ISIS in Iraq, Assad in Syria, and militants all over the place.
Seriously, what do these people want the President to do? Use teleporters? ODSTs (Halo game I think)?
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