USA! USA! ... not.

U.S. Strikes Taliban-Held Land Near Kunduz Airport as Afghan Crisis Deepens
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Militants claimed stretches of highway and continued to threaten the area, where hundreds of soldiers and civilians have been holed up.

It's too bad our president here at home is too weak to demonstrate the courage of his convictions.

Obama has been right in his ambivalence about getting deeply involved in Syria. But he’s never had the courage of his own ambivalence to spell out his reasoning to the American people. He keeps letting himself get pummeled into doing and saying things that his gut tells him won’t work, so he gets the worst of all worlds: His rhetoric exceeds the policy, and the policy doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, Obama’s Republican critics totally lack the wisdom of our own experience. They blithely advocate “fire, ready, aim” in Syria without any reason to believe their approach will work there any better than it did for us in Iraq or Libya. People who don’t know how to fix inner-city Baltimore think they know how to rescue downtown Aleppo — from the air!

Friedman, no foreign affairs genius himself, has been consistently wrong about US involvement in the Middle East, but here he is spot on. It is not the in the United States' national security interests to overthrow yet another dictator, leaving what remains of the country in shambles.

US -- stay out.
Let Putin handle this one, as it's much closer to home, and quite frankly: we have pressing domestic issues that still need addressing, even if our elite classes still think they can sprinkle money and pretend the country here at home is fine.

Short-term thinkers lose us big in the long-run.
See Bush, George W. and his legacy of freedome in Iraq and Afghanistan. (If only we could train MORE Syrians to fight for their own homeland, instead of volunteering American forces and weaponry, at such a cost to our homeland. But where there is no will, there is no way to win. There's a reason we don't want outside countries like US clamoring to join, finance, and "train" soldiers in a civil war.)