Incidentally, the decision not to get more involved in Syria was probably the better choice at the time. No matter what you think of the dictator's morals, a good portion of the rebels was basically made up of radical Islamists. Exactly who you don't want to be in charge when ISIS enters the scene.

It was interesting to see how suddenly our media (in Germany) stopped their sympathetic reporting on the Syrian rebels and how desperately they need our support (i.e. at least give them some guns) when ISIS began making headlines.

I remember thinking that supporting the rebels in Syria (though it viscerally felt like the "right thing" to do) was probably the worse bad choice to make even before Russia & al heavily spoke against it. It's easy to forget that both the direct intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the less direct support of the rebellions during the "Arab Spring" resulted in very unstable situations and a very disconcerting shift towards Islamist extremism in those regions.