Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt argued that Syria may be “the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.”

Hiatt contends that Obama managed to convince the American public that doing nothing was “the smart and moral policy.” The way Obama sees it, the United States causes more problems than it solves, and besides there wasn’t much we could do anyway by backing a bunch of rag-tag rebels against Assad and his allies.