As Obama administration officials have frequently said, the longer Bashar al-Assad’s regime survives, the worse the outcome will be for Syria, its neighbors — all of which are U.S. allies — and the United States. Failure to back more moderate forces, which have been chronically short of effective weapons, will prolong the war and could leave the United States and its allies confronting a postwar Syria in which they have no friends and al-Qaeda and other extremists are ascendant.
So why was the Petraeus plan rejected? According to the Times, Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Clinton were rebuffed when they presented the plan to the White House. At the time, Mr. Obama was in the midst of an reelection campaign in which he frequently assured voters that “the tide of war is receding.” Hopes of reviving the plan after the election were thwarted when Mr. Petraeus resigned and Ms. Clinton was sidelined by illness.
Mr. Obama’s reasons for quashing the Syria plan were surely not purely political. But the president’s only public explanation for his resistance, in a recent interview with the New Republic, amounted to excuse-making. He wondered why he should concern himself with Syria and not the civil war in the Congo, as if the United States cannot intervene in any war unless it does in all; he asked whether providing weapons to rebels would “trigger even worse violence,” ignoring the testimony of his own aides that, under his present policy, the carnage “every day . . . it gets worse,” as new Secretary of State John F. Kerry put it.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2...plan-civil-war