J.R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, wrote that “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
The current live dragon is Syria and its dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Despite two years in which he killed over a hundred thousand Syrians and made a million more refugees, no one anticipated that he would use also poison gas against them, but that’s what dictators do.
One of the reasons given for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had gassed several thousand Kurds. At the time, the world said and did nothing. Saddam had also waged war against Iran for eight fruitless years. Iran was our enemy, so at the time we did nothing.
When jihadi fighters fought the Soviet Union to drive it out of Afghanistan, the U.S. provided covert assistance. Then In 1993 the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred. In 1998, Osama bin Laden announced a declaration of war on the U.S. Until September 11, 2001, we mostly ignored him.
Now the U.S. must confront a civil war in Syria, an element of which includes al Qaeda, and the primary criticism of President Barack Obama is that he has no Plan B.
Despite the live dragon in Syria, he mostly dithered for the last two years. Obama gained office by opposing our wars in the Middle East and seeking to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq. He has spent the last five years cutting the U.S. defense budget.