Robert Ford, the former U.S. Ambassador to Syria under President Obama, said America missed several key opportunities to intervene in that country's civil war.
Speaking on WNPR’s Where We Live, Ford said one error of the Obama administration was its largely hands off approach.
"We warned the president that if the United States did nothing, extremist elements such as Al Qaeda, such as the Islamic State ... would, within the Syrian opposition say, 'You Syrians who thought the West cared about you and cared about Muslims -- see, they don't. They lie to you. And so you might as well join our jihad, because the West will never help you.'"
In 2014, Ambassador Ford resigned from the Obama administration, describing the president's policy on Syria as "indefensible."
Ford is a decorated diplomat who received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award, the U.S. Department of State's highest award.
Ford said President Trump's hardline rhetoric about Syria, and its refugees, is also counter-productive, serving as a recruitment tool for the Islamic state, which may undermine any gains won by his increased calls for military action against ISIS.
"It makes absolutely no sense to me, Mr. President, to increase military fighting against the Islamic state," he said. "At the same time, politically, we're helping them recruit. So we kill them over here and they just replace them with recruits over there. And it's a cycle. That doesn't make a lot of sense -- to undermine what the military right hand is doing with a really clumsy ill-thought out left-hand strategy."
According to the United Nations, over four million people have fled Syria since 2011. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed in a conflict that's involved massive aerial bombings and chemical weapons.
