The Washington Post editorial board crushed the Obama administration for its poor handling of the crisis in Syria over the last several years in a recent op-ed.
That failure was summed up in a single devastating paragraph.
“A $500 million program launched last year to train moderate Syrian rebel forces, officials conceded, had been an abject failure. But, the White House contended, the president was not at fault because he had never believed in the strategy, anyway,” the op-ed noted.
The military recently admitted that countless millions of dollars poured into the program have only produced 4-5 American-trained fighters in the battlefield, despite the initial goal of training 5,400 fighters in the first year. White House press secretary Josh Earnest quickly noted that the president had always been somewhat skeptical of the plan.
“How un-presidential that sounds — ‘We didn’t want to do it, we thought it was unsound but you made us do it,’ ” Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan under the Obama administration, told The New York Times. “It’s just indicative of their whole approach to Syria, which is not to have a policy. This is the worst thing they could say.”
Nevertheless, Obama rejected a suggestion from his national security team in 2012 to train Syrian opposition forces. He also turned down proposals to create safe zones for civilians. The fear was that U.S. intervention would result in the situation Europe and the Middle East now face, a situation which has occurred entirely in the absence of such intervention.
The editorial board pointed out that a coherent strategy regarding Syria could have prevented a large part of the current refugee crisis in Europe.
While the United States does nothing, Russia is busy sending troops and military equipment into Syria to bolster President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the fight against the Islamic State. Recent satellite imagery showed four SU-30SM Russian aircraft sitting on a runway at the al-Assad international airport. The aircraft were initially mistaken for the SU-27 Flanker.
Russia has also blamed the United States for opposing the Assad government.
Still, there is little consensus on what action the U.S. should take, especially among GOP presidential candidates. Donald Trump thinks Assad and ISIS should feel free to fight each other. Florida Republican Marco Rubio argued that because the administration didn’t arm moderate elements in a reasonable enough time frame, radicals filled the gap.
“That is why ISIS grew,” Rubio said.
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