Syria Time

Suriya al Kubra!

Whale, looks like the clock has plumb ran out of 44"s Bystander In Chief manuever as far as Syrian chiz goes 

44's administration, rightfully concerned about the costs of intervention in Syria, failed to grasp early enough just how much it would cost to stay out of this ugly situation. As the war has dragged on, the humanitarian toll has grown to obscene proportions (far worse than anything that would have happened in Libya without intervention), communal and sectarian hatreds have become poisonous almost ensuring more bloodletting and ethnic and religious cleansing, and instability has spread from Syria into Iraq, Lebanon and even Turkey. All of these problems grow worse the longer the war goes on—but it is becoming harder and costlier almost day by day to intervene.

But beyond these problems, the failure to intervene early in Syria (when "leading from behind" might well have worked) has handed important victories to both the terrorists and the Russia-Iran axis, and has seriously eroded the administration's standing with important allies. Russia and Iran backed Bashar al-Assad; the president called for his overthrow—and failed to achieve it. To hardened realists in Middle Eastern capitals, this is conclusive proof that the American president is irredeemably weak. His failure to seize the opportunity for what the Russians and Iranians fear would have been an easy win in Syria cannot be explained by them in any other way.

Ouch!

In these circumstances, it is the easiest thing to say that, in the case of Syria in particular, there are only bad options. That may be true. But increasingly it may be that there is a worse option: doing nothing

One of the big anti Great Satan LOLs around the begining of Surge time was - Look, we may not be so great at nation building but we are the world history masters of nation destroying

Tactical delights like cruise missiles, air strikes, seizing WMD to unAss Bashar Bay Bee into a war criminal trial, exile or a grave aside - the strategical delights need to be tho't about. 

True enough there are no good options - and 3 little Syrias (with a dash of Kurdistan thrown in) with the resulting sectarian slow bleed may actually be more better than watching mass casualities events like WMD in Damascus suburbs

Pic - "Post War Syria"