He blames Obama’s supposed reluctance to jump into the Syrian civil war as the reason for the current Iraqi mess.  See here.

Obama effectively canceled air strikes against the Syrian regime, which had used chemical weapons on civilians in defiance of an American “red line.”

Gerson chooses to ignore Seymour Hersch’s London Review of Books expose of how Turkey’s president enabled the gas attacks to spur more US intervention in Syria.

We already know the US is already heavily involved in Syria by way of funneling arms left over from the Libyan war to Syria.  That project resulted in getting four state department employees killed.  Then there are the CIA and special ops boots on the ground that are not counted as “boots on the ground”.

On this foreign policy theory, challenges can be managed by narrowing them. Pick the solvable problem that relates most directly to U.S. interests — in this case, chemical weapons — without becoming embroiled in broader conflicts. And a message was duly sent to friends in the region (the Gulf states, Jordan, the Free Syrian Army): Apart from U.S. humanitarian assistance, they were on their own.

As it should be.  Let the Middle East settle its own problems.  Then again why should they bother?  Saudi Arabia wants a hard-line Sunni ruled Islamic state and the US is unwittingly doing their heavy lifting. Read the rest of this entry »