That didn't take long:
The Syrian government and its close allies in Moscow and Tehran warned Barack Obama that an offensive against Islamic State (Isis) within Syria would violate international law yesterday, hours after the US president announced that he was authorising an open-ended campaign of air strikes against militants on both sides of the border with Iraq.
Syrian opposition groups welcomed Obama's announcement and called for heavy weapons to fight the "terror" of Isis and Bashar al-Assad. Saudi Arabia and nine other Arab states pledged to back the US plan "as appropriate".
A year after Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron failed to galvanize their people, their legislators, or the international community to support bombing Syria over the
disputed claim that Assad had used
poison gas against his opponents, Obama and Cameron are finding more success in building support for bombing Assad's most vicious and successful opponent. The bombings will commence, although the targets will be different, and the main beneficiaries will be those who make money building the weapons.
As with the earlier attempt to sell a bombing campaign against the enemies of the people who will be targeted by the just announced bombing campaign, there is no clear explanation of how this is supposed to make things better, how long it will take, how much money it will cost, and what the toll will be on innocent civilians. And it should go without saying that when a hopeless mission that has no prospect of definable success inevitably comes to be seen as a quagmire and a failure, the hawks will froth that the real problem was that the bombing campaign was too limited to begin with. The problem wasn't the war, it was that the war wasn't big enough.
Meanwhile, Assad has the temerity to assert that bombing one of his enemies on his country's soil without his government's permission somehow is a violation of his nation's sovereignty. How quaint. And fresh off its annexation of Crimea, and its incursions into eastern Ukraine, Vladimir Putin's Russia supports Assad's assertion about sovereignty. And those who wanted Assad bombed a year ago already are calling for the new political momentum that supports bombing Assad's terrorist enemies to expand to include bombing Assad himself. Syrian opposition groups, presumably including those ostensible moderates the United States and its allies have been supporting all along. And all of this makes great sense. To the profit margins of defense contractors, anyway.