The administration's plans aren't working in Syria:
Despite a forthcoming review of options in the deteriorating Syria crisis, the White House on Tuesday signaled that President Barack Obama remains wary of any direct U.S. involvement in the three-year-old civil war. ...
"We have to examine what the alternatives some might be proposing are, and whether they're in our national security interests, and whether a desire to do something about it could lead us, the United States, to take action that can produce the kind of unintended consequences we've seen in the past," Carney told a news briefing.
Yeah, we wouldn't want to make things worse than 140,000 dead and counting plus al Qaeda grabbing terrain in Syria and expanding back into Iraq.
Remember two years ago when we refused to send arms to the rebels? Remember what our State Department said?
“We definitely don’t want to militarize the situation. If it’s avoidable, we are going to avoid it. But increasingly it looks like it may not be avoidable,” the official if reported to have said.
Yeah, we didn't want to "militarize" the situation back then, I mean, it was getting pretty bad:
The U.N. estimates that 5,400 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011. But that figure is from January, when the U.N. stopped counting because deteriorating security prevented verification of the figures.
As I noted back then:
Further militarizing it simply means giving the rebels more of a chance to fight back against the tanks, artillery, and helicopter gunships of the Assad regime. That would be a good thing and not a bad development.
So we didn't intervene. That was the anti-Bush thing to do. We thought that restraint would make things better.
I mean, in 8 years of America fighting in Iraq we defeated Saddam, Iran, al Qaeda, and established a fragile pro-American democracy at the cost of 120,000+ Iraqi casualties.
Remember, we changed Iraq from a Saddam-era gulag that supported terrorism to a country under pressure from Iran but actually fighting al Qaeda, which is our common enemy.
After two years of inaction over Syria, we've allowed an American enemy to survive, strengthened Iran, al Qaeda, and Russia, and weakened a fragile pro-American democracy in Iraq. And Lebanon and Jordan are threatened by instability.
So the unintended--I assume--consequence was 135,000 more dead Syrians with no end in sight and a growing al Qaeda threat to us.
Thus spake smart diplomacy.
