Testifying before the Senate foreign affairs committee on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry refused to rule out putting boots on the ground in Syria: “In the event Syria imploded, for instance, or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of al-Nusra or someone else and it was clearly in the interest of our allies — all of us, the British, the French, and others — to prevent those weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements, I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to the President of the United States to secure our country.”

Later, attempting to walk back those comments, Kerry said he was merely “thinking out loud” in an attempt to answer a “hypothetical question.” He added, “The president has no intention and will not and we do not want to put American troops on the ground to fight this or be involved in the fighting of the civil war.”

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).