It's hard to imagine an unhappier man than Barack Obama's aide Benjamin Rhodes, whose ''anguish'' is the subject of a March 15 New York Times profile. What keeps the 35-year-old Deputy National Security Advisor up nights is the 70,000 casualties in two years of civil war in Syria, and the likelihood that whatever the United States does to help the Syrian opposition will leave more people dead.

Rhodes came to Washington with a rescue fantasy about the Muslim world and a sentimental obsession that the job of American foreign policy was to protect civilians from harm.

America is now impotent in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe that is spreading from Syria to Iraq and Lebanon. The idealists of the present administration and its predecessor are the proximate cause of the bloodshed.
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America's blundering provided the impetus for each step in this scripted tragedy, except, of course, for the blundering of the European Union.
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It is a matter of simple logic that countries composed of potentially warring ethnic and sectarian constituencies can only be stable under minority rule. Majority rule would threaten the existence of minorities and give them cause to fight to the death.
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The correct American policy response to the unraveling of the Arab world should have been was to neutralize Iran, specifically, destroying its capacity to make nuclear weapons and reducing the Revolutionary Guards. With Iran de-fanged, the Syrian conflict would have burned itself out by now.

Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah fighters would not have reinforced the Assad regime, and the Saudis and Turks would not have sponsored Sunni insurgents. Life in Egypt and Syria would have been miserable, even violent, but the violence would have remained localized. It was time for Mubarak to go, but America might have smoothed the transition in cooperation with the military and the small minority of demographic reformers.
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American blunders through two administrations have set a regional Sunni-Shi'ite war in motion that the utopians in Washington are powerless to prevent.
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From the Republican side, the ill omen came from the Conservative Political Action Committee retreat last week in Maryland, where the Kentucky isolationist Senator Rand Paul won the straw poll for the next Republican presidential nomination. Paul and his constituents want no foreign policy at all. That, in effect, is what we have at the Obama White House. It may turn into a bi-partisan consensus.

The liberal interventionists of the Obama administration may have set in motion one of history's biggest humanitarian catastrophes, while the hawkish interventionists of the Republican party may have persuaded American voters to switch off the world news for a generation.