Pops wrote: Syria was just an extension....
Not really. Syria is clearly Obama's war.
For some reason Obama decided he wanted regime change in Syria---and he said this explicitly in multiple speeches. Beginning in 2012 Obama approved a large covert CIA program in Syria to fund, arm and train jihadi groups, including groups affiliated with al Qaida, who were fighting the Assad regime. The code name for this program was TIMBER SYCAMORE. BY some estimates the US was spending over a billion dollars a year on this covert program in Syria during the last four years of the Obama administration.
Timber_SycamoreIn hindsight, it was idiotic for the Obama administration to be funding, arming and training jihadists in Syria. Its estimated that the US-backed jihadis killed about 100,000 Syrian soldiers, along with huge numbers of civilians, and totally destroyed civil society in Syria. The islamists that Obama was supporting targeted Shia and christian villages in particular for destruction, because the Assad regime had protected them in the past. And then, to makes things worse, some of the US trained fighters with their US supplied weapons hooked up with a little group called ISIL, that was headed by an Iraqi. This group became the most powerful military force in easternmost Syria and booted out almost all the Syrian government forces, much to the Obama administration's delight. But then they did something the CIA handlers and the idiots in the Obama administration never anticipated---they launched an invasion of Iraq. The Obama administration responded by sending US troops BACK to Iraq for a THIRD time for Iraq War 3. Then Obama ordered US troops and air strikes into Syria as well---the first time US troops had been in Syria.
The third Iraq War and the new war in Syria that Obama got the US involved in dragged on through the end of the Obama administration, and only now are ending. When Trump took office he intensified the bombing and finally defeated IS---first in Iraq and now in Syria. One can only hope now Trump has the guts to ignore the caterwauling amoung the media and the Ds and the neocons and take the next step and actually get our troops out of Syria.
Cheers!