On some issues, I’m glad Obama is in the White House now, and not a Republican. From Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker:

In Syria, more than seventy thousand people have died, and three and a half million have been forced from their homes; the refugee camp across the border in Jordan is now that country’s fifth-largest city. The Administration has given the Syrian opposition more than six hundred and fifty million dollars in nonmilitary aid, but Obama has consistently opposed arming the rebels or intervening militarily on their behalf. The United States has taken a tenuous position: not deep enough to please the rebels or its allies in Europe, or to topple the regime, or to claim leadership in the war’s aftermath—but also, perhaps most important, not so deep that it can’t get out. “Here’s what we wrestle with: there are huge costs and unintended consequences that go with a military intervention that could last for many years,” Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me. After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little appetite for a new conflict. In a recent poll by the Times and CBS News, only a quarter of respondents felt that the U.S. should take responsibility for Syria. “The country is exhausted,” a senior White House official said.

There’s no doubt that Assad is an evil man. But who would replace him? The people holding two Orthodox bishops as hostages? These people?:

But, according to American officials and nongovernmental groups that work in the region, the overwhelming majority of the rebels are fighting for an Islamic republic. Al Nusra, like the other Al Qaeda affiliates, wants to do away with the Syrian state altogether and reëstablish the Islamic caliphate. “The Islamists are the majority,’’ Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst for the Institute for the Study of War who has travelled to rebel-held areas several times, said. The small number of non-Islamists among the rebels are often socialists, she told me, and are referred to by their peers with an English word: “hippies.”

In April, Dempsey reversed his position on giving weapons to the rebels, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was no longer sure the United States “could clearly identify the right people” to arm. “It is actually more confusing on the opposition side today than it was six months ago,’’ he said. The rise of Al Nusra has made it seem increasingly possible that what comes after Assad will be a regime led by hard-line Islamists or, perhaps more likely, a bloody fight for power among various rebel groups.

Read the whole thing.

[H/T: Sullivan]