Obama Rejects Candidates' Ideas For Solving Crisis In Syria

[Comrade Grumpy]

6. I'm not a big fan of Obama's Syria policy, but it could be much worse.

He let the CIA do one of their cowboy operations training and equipping Syrian insurgents, and then supplanted that with the fiasco of the open training program just cancelled.

He let the Saudi-Qatari-UAE monarchies and Turkey get away with turning heavy-handed repression of protest movements into a civil war that has destroyed the country. Civil wars don't happen just because people are unhappy; they happen when somebody pays for them. In this case, foreign interlopers, including us.

On the other hand, he walked away from bombing Syria in 2013 and got the destruction of chemical weapons in return.

And he isn't being pushed into worse-than-stupid ideas like the no-fly zone.

I kinda feel sorry for the guy. He got stuck with two intractable messes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he, and we, are still digging our way out.