With a grand total of four—or maybe five!—Syrian rebels in the field following a year of training efforts, it’s obvious that things aren’t working well. President Obama apparently thinks it’s not his fault:
The White House says it is not to blame….At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”
Most of the comments from Republicans are pretty ho-hum partisan bellyaching. But this one seems on target:
Ryan C. Crocker, a retired career diplomat who was an ambassador to Afghanistan under Mr. Obama, said the president was right to think a train-and-arm program would not work. But the president, Mr. Crocker added, should have either continued to resist it or at least taken ownership of it rather than blame others for its failure.
“How un-presidential that sounds — ‘We didn’t want to do it, we thought it was unsound but you made us do it,’ ” said Mr. Crocker, now dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. “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.”
When he’s right, he’s right. Maybe supporters of the training mission ought to take some lumps too, but the buck stops in the Oval Office. Once he agreed to do it, it was Obama’s plan. The failure is his too.
