Columnist Charles Krauthammer ripped the Obama administration's Syrian policy on Special Report Monday, saying his weak intervention was worse than doing nothing.
Speaking about Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin's tense G8 summit meeting about how to resolve the Syrian conflict despite supporting opposing sides, Krauthammer said "it wasn't a frosty meeting, it was a useless meeting."
While Russia has a long-vested interest in having influence over Syria and has shown clear, direct support for Bashar al-Assad, Obama's tepid aid of small arms to the rebels was "marginal" and unlikely to have any influence over the outcome, Krauthammer said.
"This is a declaration of unseriousness," he said. "It's exactly the same as when Obama announced the tripling of troops in Afghanistan and in the next sentence announced that we're leaving. You're either serious about intervention or you aren't, and I am against any intervention where you're not serious."
If he wanted to change the course of the war, Krauthammer argued, he needed to be more direct with the American people about the U.S. interests in seeing the Iranian-supported Assad regime defeated. Polls show dwindling support for U.S. intervention in Syria, but Krauthammer said this was because Obama never discusses the situation.
"You make a speech, explain it, and do something serious," he said. "You bomb the air fields. You don't have to knock out all of the aircraft equipment as we did in Libya, but if you prevent the aircraft from getting into the air by bombing the air fields, you have done something serious. You flood them with heavy weapons, not just light weapons, or you do nothing. But this, I think, is worse than nothing."