John Cole turned me onto this:

A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.

The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.

It’s difficult to know from the article exactly what’s going on here, but it sure looks as though we’re again putting our hands where they don’t belong.

I think the interesting part of Obama’s Middle Eastern policy is how it’s more a refactoring, than a rebooting, of Bush’s. Refactoring, in case you don’t know, is a software term meaning that you change the code to something else that does basically the same thing. For example, maybe you change something in favor of a more elegant design, but you want to preserve the functionality. Obama ended the U.S. War in Iraq, and he says he intends to end the U.S. War in Afghanistan next year. I believe him. But he has shown no intention of ending the U.S. War in the Middle East, and I suspect that Republicans were relatively silent about the former two developments because Obama has substantially increased the level of militarism outside of these specific theaters. I suspect that the medium-range liberal freakout over the Times’s Kill List story a few weeks back had a lot to do with this–the idea that Obama will end the specific, declared, Congressionally-approved wars we stupidly decided to fight, while continuing the non-approved, shadier, morally-ambiguous activities that have become so prevalent in the past three years. And that if soldiers aren’t dying, nobody will pay much attention. Refactoring, simply put.

Obama’s tactics are quite different from Bush’s, as are some of his assumptions. Bush blithely sent troops in harms way based on hunches, while Obama seems deeply resistant to doing so. Of course, doing this is also politically much more perilous. So drones, starting private little wars, and relying on air power have become more prevalent weapons in accomplishing the big strategy here. But the strategy is unchanged–some combination of regime change where possible/applicable, blowback-inducing violence to try to take out the bad guys, all of which seems geared toward transmitting some sort of ideal that simply won’t take if helped along by foreign intervention. Of all the Arab Spring uprisings, the most successful has been Tunisia, in which America had no role. The least successful was Libya, in which America had the most significant role. The jury is still out on Egypt, though it seems unlikely that they’ll blaze a new, liberal trail in the Middle East at this point. Obama seems to have surrendered the realpolitik that he initially offered, in exchange for the same failed redraw-the-map schemes that the Bush Administration failed to implement. I have no idea why this occurred, perhaps the impulse to just do something is irresistible to a domestically-stymied chief executive, especially if all these grand visions seem so achievable.