‘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.

“Obama at War,” premiering Tuesday night on PBS, is the latest first-rate program from the Boston-based WGBH-TV Frontline series, now in its 32nd year as America’s top investigative documentary film producer. It is crisply written, reported and produced by veteran correspondent Martin Smith, who first examined the rise of Al-Qaeda in a Frontline documentary three years before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and has revisited the subject several times since.

Al-Qaeda, once thought to be on the ropes, is at work in Syria, but only as a bit player compared with ISIS, whose fighters in recent days overran the historic Syrian crossroads city of Palmyra as well as Ramadi, a key city in Iraq’s Sunni heartland. Now Washington is at its own crossroads, once again wringing its hands over getting more deeply involved in the swirling chaos or basically standing back and hoping all the bad actors in the drama will be consumed by fighting one another.

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