Reuters

On Thursday, "President Barack Obama authorized his administration to provide arms to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad," the Wall Street Journal reports. "The classified order directing the Central Intelligence Agency to coordinate arming the rebels in concert with its allies reverses a long-standing policy that limited the U.S. to providing nonlethal support."

Is this where we are now?

Involvement in a new war comes not via a declaration from Congress, nor even a major announcement from the president -- instead, a leak of a classified order is thought sufficient to alert the public!

One of the president's staunchest supporters, Andrew Sullivan, says that this is a betrayal, arguing that Obama was elected to get the United States out of armed conflicts in the Middle East. "By deciding to arm the Sunni radicals fighting the Shiites in Syria and Lebanon, the president has caved to the usual establishment subjects who still want to run or control the entire world," Sullivan writes. "I don't buy the small arms qualifier. You know that's the foot in the door to dragging the U.S. into the middle of a civil war we do not understand and cannot control." If arming the rebels has any effect, he concludes, "it will be to draw out the conflict still longer and kill more people."