Syria's Civil War, Armed by the U.S.

The Republican argument against President Barack Obama's actions in Syria are little more than retroactive critiques. The Republicans contend that President Obama should have issued military strikes in Syria when Bashar al-Assad's regime first violently attacked the peaceful protesters in 2011. The Republicans, however, do not have a coherent forward-thinking strategy. It's not clear if the Party favors American boots on the ground at this point.

For his part, President Obama has ordered limited air strikes targeting at the Islamic State (also known as ISIL and ISIS). These strikes are meant to aid the Free Syrian Army's and the Kurdish Peshmerga's ground forces.

The Syrian civil war has been fueled by American arms already. Virtually all sides are massacring their enemies with American weapons. The Iraqi army is an American-trained and funded force. Under Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the army was essentially a Shi'a extremist militia.

The Islamic State, a group formerly affiliated with al Qaeda, acquired American weapons from the Iraqi army when it fled in the face of IS's onslaught into Mosul, Iraq. IS is a Sunni extremist group designed to brutally combat the Shi'a extremism of the Iraqi regime.

The U.S. had hoped to fund rebels battling the Assad regime in Syria and are arming them through a program based in Jordan. But the rebels are made up of hundreds of different groups with disparate aims. The Islamic State is one of those groups fighting Assad, a follower of Shi'a Islam. Even Assad has been the beneficiary of a significant amount of economic aid from America in happier times.

The U.S. has chosen to support the Free Syrian Army, a shadowy group that dubiously argued the Islamic State is an Assad plot. The FSA is essentially the least bad option for an American government under political pressure to act.

Without the torrent of American weapons in the region, the Syrian civil war would quite likely have been far less bloody. Considering the number of hostile extremist groups operating in Syrian and Iraq, the U.S. should not have flooded this volatile region with arms. It was an explosion of uncontrollable violence waiting to happen. But, as the Republican know all too well, it's easy to say what we should have done.

We should learn from our mistakes. Throwing more gas onto the fire isn't going to put it out. The U.S. should not take any military action in Syria or Iraq. The arms that we give to our allies in the region often end up in the hands our enemies. We've also seen that today's friend is tomorrow's enemy in the region. We cannot be seen as backing one extremist Islamic sect over another, a strategy the U.S. has continuously and contradictorily invoked throughout the Middle East.

The violence in Syria and Iraq is incredibly sad. The U.S. must act and the goal must be to limit deaths. The U.S. can do so by accepting Syrian refugees and better funding refugee camps in neighboring countries. Throwing more weapons into the bloody stalemate is not the answer.