Mick Hartley

And, while we're on the subject, here's Lee Smith:

Even die-hard supporters of President Barack Obama’s “realist” approach to foreign affairs are nauseated by the White House’s Syria policy. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, a vocal supporter of the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, is fed up with nearly five years of the “fecklessness and purposelessness” of a Syria policy that “has become hard to distinguish” from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s. “Syria is now the Obama administration’s shame,” Cohen wrote last week, “a debacle of such dimensions that it may overshadow the president’s domestic achievements.” Ambassador Dennis Ross and New York Times military correspondent David Sangeralso published articles excoriating Obama’s policies in Syria. There is a military solution, it’s “just not our military solution,” a senior U.S. security official admitted to Sanger. It’s Putin’s.

Perhaps most damning of the stink-bouquets was a Washington Post op-ed from former New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier and Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff. “It is time for those who care about the moral standing of the United States to say that this policy is shameful,” they wrote. “If the United States and its NATO allies allow [Putin and his allies] to encircle and starve the people of Aleppo, they will be complicit in crimes of war.”

What made the Post op-ed particularly striking is that Wieseltier and Ignatieff are both friends and former colleagues of Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power. Ignatieff taught with her at Harvard, and Wieseltier published early parts of her book on genocide, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which described in searing detail the strategies by which American officials typically deflect responsibility for the massacre of innocents. Power’s 600-page book consists largely of case studies of how the United States responded to 20th-century genocides, like the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, the Nazi Holocaust, Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns against the Kurds, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. As Power notes in the book’s conclusion, “What is most shocking about America’s reaction … is not that the United States refused to deploy U.S. ground forces to combat the atrocities. For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for U.S. ground invasions. What is most shocking is that U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime.”

There can be no doubt that the murderous campaign of sectarian cleansing that Assad and his allies Russia and Iran have been waging against the Sunni Arab population of Syria is a crime of historic proportions—the first genocide of the still-young 21st century, or, if you prefer the language of a recent U.N. report, state-sponsored mass extermination….

It is hard to imagine any future edition of A Problem From Hell being complete without a chapter on Syria. Instead of helping to topple Assad, the mass-murdering goon who drops barrel bombs on civilian areas, the White House launched a phony train-and-equip program that required rebel fighters to sign a document that they wouldn’t use their weapons against the dictator who was murdering their families. The administration’s anti-ISIS campaign has allowed Assad to ignore ISIS nearly altogether and focus his attention instead on destroying other opposition groups, and indiscriminately targeting Sunni towns and villages. The White House’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has now put additional tens of billions of dollars in Iran’s coffers, which it is now free to use in supporting Assad’s genocide. Indeed, it is partly because Obama was so eager to secure a nuclear agreement with Iran that he disdained any efforts to stop Tehran’s ally from slaughtering Sunnis when Assad first started nearly five years ago.

How have the president and his aides managed to avoid being held accountable for their complicity in a five-year-long orgy of mass murder that has now taken an estimated 470,000 Syrian lives?

But read it all.