U.S. - Change of Attitude on Syria?

Note, all that's happening today could possibly have been avoided if the U.S. and the West had taken firmer action (military strikes at the least) in Syria at the beginning of the civil war.  Then, hindsight is always 20-20.

"Shift in U.S. attitude over involvement in Syria after Foley execution" PBS NewsHour 8/24/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Joining us now from Washington D.C. is Dion Nissenbaum of The Wall Street Journal.

It seems the pace of change here and the U.S. attitude in involvement in Syria or in airstrikes has changed dramatically just in the last 24-36 hours.

DION NISSENBAUM:  Yes there’s no question that the beheading of James Foley changed the calculus for the administration here and the rhetoric ramped up almost immediately.

You heard Secretary of State John Kerry saying that their wickedness, it has to be destroyed.  The pentagon is really escalating its efforts to identify targets inside Syria.

They’re looking at expanding the air campaign in Iraq.  I think militarily they could expand this fairly quickly.

I think what we need to see in the coming week is whether there’s the political will to move in this direction, and you’ll probably remember it was a year ago that we were having a similar conversation after president Assad was accused of the chemical weapons attack in Damascus that killed hundreds of people, and President Obama was seeking support for military strikes in Syria at that point as well.