This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can’t have nice things. This is why the first act of any sane administration would be to distribute psychotropic drugs, free and in large quantities, in Foggy Bottom. These people are not merely stupid, delusional, and self-absorbed, they are maniacally and dangerously so:

More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says US policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed US-led diplomatic process.”

Such a step would represent a radical shift in the administration’s approach to the civil war in Syria, and there is little evidence that President Obama has plans to change course. Obama has emphasized the military campaign against the Islamic State over efforts to dislodge Assad. Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have all but collapsed.

But the memo, filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the lingering frustration within the administration over how to deal with a war that has killed more than 400,000 people.

Let’s review the bidding here. Who helped change the fighting in Syria from the periodic massacre of dissidents that is part and parcel of Middle Eastern and Arab governance to a full fledged civil war involving foreign powers and concomitant humanitarian catastrophe? That would be the same State Department that was running weapons into Syria from our consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Right now the carnage in Syria is declining

If you compare the areas under ISIS control in January 2015 with today, you see it has suffered a major roll back (ISIS areas are depicted in gray)

January 2015

Today

For better or worse, the only really effective force in Syria for fighting ISIS is the Assad government. Most of the “rebels” are indistinguishable in ideology from ISIS and those who are distinguishable are Iranian proxies.

If your desire is to mitigate civilian deaths then tamping down the violence rather than increasing it should be your objective. If you like humanitarian disasters and senseless murder, then the obvious thing to do is intensify the war.

The only logical reason for this recommendation, other than seeing genocide as a spectator sport, is that a significant number of people were invested in the failed Hillary Clinton strategy of toppling dictators and turning whole countries over to Islamic radicals. They are miffed that their strategy didn’t work as advertised and are trying to force a feckless and spineless Obama administration to double down on a course of action that never had a chance of working.