The Obama administration has sidelined the nation’s intelligence forces, damaging the ability for the United States to affect change in Syria. Thanks to whistleblowers, we all know of the intelligence cooking scandal, where U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) pressured analysts to skew reports to make it appear the war against the Islamic State was going better than expected. In doing so, CENTCOM was only telling the commander in chief what he wanted to hear: His limp-wristed foreign policy was working. Instead of correcting the mistakes, changing the briefings to show Barack Obama how truly disastrous Syria had become, CENTCOM pushed out the analysts critical of Obama’s strategy to arm and train 5,000 Syrian rebels to the tune of $500 million so they could fight the Islamic State. Last September, only five of those fighters remained.

While the Obama administration was busy quashing dissent among the ranks, it missed an opportunity to avert the whole mess in Syria. According to a former CIA operative, the agency was developing plans to oust Bashar al Assad in 2012, long before Obama created and retreated from his red line. Former CIA officer Doug Laux, who was in Syria at the time, said the CIA was developing 50 different strategies for ousting the Syrian dictator but Obama put the brakes on all of them. Would it have helped? As one former senior official said, the outcome “couldn’t be worse” than what we have today. Now Obama’s leaving the White House in a few months with Syria in disarray and all the honest intelligence analysts pushed out of CENTCOM — quite a mess for the next president to fix.