Max Boot made a revealing comment in his complaint about Congress’ reluctance to provide more funding to “moderate” rebels in Syria:

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more that the U.S. refuses to fund the Free Syrian Army, the weaker it will get–and the more its weakness will be used as an excuse not to support it [bold mine-DL].

One of the more significant flaws in the argument for arming the “moderate” opposition is that supporters of this measure have always taken for granted that the U.S. simply has to throw money and weapons at anti-regime forces on the off chance that they will become effective. There is no real reason to expect that this will happen, and helping to stoke another country’s civil war is an appalling way to put this theory to the test. There has never been any serious attempt to demonstrate why backing these rebels is a good use of U.S. resources, nor has there been much of an effort to explain why Americans should want their government to contribute to the continued bloodletting in Syria. In the absence of any remotely persuasive case for backing “moderate” rebel groups, U.S. support has been very limited and slow in coming, but the extraordinary thing is that the U.S. has provided any support in the first place.

There are many reasons not to back these rebel groups, not least of which is the likelihood that U.S.-provided arms will end up in the wrong hands. That has already happened and will very likely keep happening in the future. There are no good reasons to provide this support, and this may just now be starting to dawn on a few more members of Congress. It is reasonable to withhold support for a proxy that has no chance of winning. That is especially true when no one can honestly envision success for “moderate” rebel groups even with U.S. backing. The U.S. is not obliged to provide backing to anti-regime rebels anywhere in the world, and there is usually no American interest in doing so. The burden of proof is on the advocates of providing this aid to prove that this is a desirable and wise thing to do, and this they have failed to show for more than three years. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. should cast its lot with the regime, which would also be a profound error, and it certainly doesn’t mean rushing to “make up” for lost time by throwing even more weapons and money down the drain. It suggests that the U.S. should not have entangled itself in the Syrian conflict to begin with, and should now be looking for ways to extricate itself from that conflict as quickly as it can.