Middle East

‘Obama at War’ Shows How Syria Was Lost

Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary and CIA chief, famously gibed in his 2014 memoir that President Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Alas, Panetta’s withering judgment is more than borne out in an unsettling new PBS documentary that reveals how the White House dithered as Syria burned, creating a vacuum for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), the deaths of 220,000 Syrians, the desperate flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Jordan and Turkey, and eventually the collapse of the Iraqi army.