Obama's Failed Syria Strategy In One Sentence

Last month the U.S. strategy in Syria unraveled, highlighted by the largest Islamist rebel brigades in Syria rejecting the Western-backed Syrian National Council (SNC) and the opposition's planned exile government.

At the moment America's preferred resolution involves peace talks at Geneva II, but that looks like a pipe dream since the strongest forces on the ground don't recognize the SNC.

Furthermore, the deal to disarm the Syrian regime's chemical weapons gives Bashar al-Assad and his allies a boost while clipping American influence in the region.

This has all effected the dominant dynamics in the war today: Islamic brigades are coalescing, al-Qaeda affiliate Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is expanding its territorial control and clashing with Kurds and rebels in the process, Assad is laughing as ISIS fights his enemies where he cannot.

Michael Young of Now writes it's astonishing that Assad's strategy to avoid attacking the al-Qaeda groups - and even collaborate with them in certain districts - has worked so well, noting that the Obama administration has a lot to do with it.

This sentence says everything about Obama's failed Syria strategy (emphasis ours):

The United States, rather than read the signals early on and arm the Syrian opposition when it was making substantial gains, allowed a vacuum to form and then fretted when that vacuum was filled by jihadists.

This echoes what Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution said earlier this week: The U.S. was worried about the rise of Syria's Islamist rebels, which contributed to unwillingness to arm the Supreme military council (i.e., the armed wing of the SNC), which had Islamists. That stance is now backfiring.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) confirmed the "high degree of frustration in the executive branch" to Greg Miller of The Washington Post:

"The situation in Syria is changing faster than the administration can keep up," Rogers said. He ... said that U.S. support for moderate opposition groups is "less than robust" and has been hobbled by "inconsistent resource allocation with stated goals."

The dysfunction can be seen in numbers of fighters: The CIA has trained fewer than 1,000 rebels while U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran and Hezbollah have trained more than 20,000 Assad militiamen and that there are about 20,000 "extremist" rebels with militant Islamist agendas.