The U.S. keeps getting more deeply ensnared in the Syrian civil war:

President Barack Obama has authorized using air power to defend a new U.S.-backed fighting force in Syria if it is attacked by Syrian government forces or other groups, raising the risk of the American military coming into direct conflict with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

The U.S. and Turkey had agreed in principle to do this over two months ago, and U.S. officials had talked about defending U.S.-backed rebels long before that, so this doesn’t come as a great surprise. Like every other step the administration has taken to get the U.S. more involved in Syria, this is a foolish decision, but one that has been slowly coming ever since the U.S. pledged to back some part of the Syrian opposition. The only good news is that the program to train and arm “moderate” rebels in Syria is such a joke that there may not be many occasions to come to their defense.

Nonetheless, Obama’s latest decision illustrates the danger of yielding to hawkish demands to “arm the rebels” in the first place: once the U.S. has taken the side of anti-regime forces in a foreign civil war, it risks being drawn into direct conflict with the regime that its proxies oppose. Administration officials think that this isn’t likely to happen because these rebels are supposed to be our ground forces for fighting ISIS in Syria, but this decision takes the U.S. one step closer to starting a new war with yet another government in the region. The prospect of fighting two opposing sides at the same time in the same civil war remains just as absurd as it did last year and the year before that, but thanks to this decision that is exactly what the U.S. may end up doing.