ANALYSIS – The uprising against the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad was still young when moderate rebels made their plea to Washington: Provide us with arms so we might fight the dictator — and prevent the rise of more extremist groups.
But President Barack Obama, who had come into office on the promise of drawing down American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, was reluctant. He was not getting into another Middle East mess.
Now, however, those same extremist groups feared by the moderates have gone on a murderous rampage through Iraq and Syria, slaying security forces and civilians and openly bragging about it on Twitter. After the fighters captured a strategic dam and sent tens of thousands of people on the run in northern Iraq, creating a humanitarian crisis, Washington was finally forced to respond. On Friday, U.S. forces bombed Islamic State positions near the Kurdish city of Erbil.
If the previous administration was too eager to get into Iraq; the current administration was all too hesitant.

When the Free Syrian Army (FSA) first sounded the alarm about more radical fighters coming to Syria, what the moderate rebels wanted from Washington, in addition to weapons, was a no-fly zone as had been imposed in Libya when rebels fought the dictator there. This would give them a better chance to fight Assad’s brutal regime and more credibility on the ground.
But even Assad’s chemical attacks against civilians did not spur American military action. Instead, Assad was told to divest himself of those weapons but was otherwise left to slaughter his people. So far, according to activists, at least 170,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, which has laid waste to cities such as Aleppo and Homs.
The FSA was largely made up of Syrian defectors and secular fighters, with a modern outlook. But without weapons and the ear of the U.S. administration, they were weak. In other words: not the group you’d join, if you were going to Syria to fight.
And many people were going.
Opportunists and true believers from around the world joined the fight as it metastasized in Syria. And in neighboring Iraq, where disenchantment with the Shiite-dominated government ran high, a group of radical Sunnis once affiliated with Al Qaeda saw an opportunity to build their brand and expand their fight into Syria in pursuit of regional dominance.
Once they arrived in Syria, the radical militants began fighting more moderate rebels; with the help of Assad’s forces, they eventually squeezed the moderates into retreat. Assad, for his part, left the radicals alone, and fighters from the Islamic State (then called ISIS or ISIL) were free to pour over the border into Iraq, first taking cities in the western Anbar Province (where many American soldiers had lost their lives) before threatening key cities in northern Iraq.

Last month, President Obama announced that 300 military advisers were going to Iraq to help security forces there battle the militants. But he ruled out deploying any troops on the ground, having pulled them out in 2011. On Friday, he took a (small) step further, approving the limited strikes — in part to protect American personnel stationed in Erbil.
The administration didn’t know whom to back among Syria’s shadowy groups. Radicals saw — and took advantage of — American hesitance, building their movement. Now that the radicals have stepped out of the shadows to show their true ambition, however, there is no longer any doubt who the enemy is.
But is the American involvement too little and too late?  (read more)