I'd say it was our blowback. If we had made a deal with Assad, he might not have allowed jihadists to flow through Syria. Heck, we might even have sweetened the deal with a few hundred million a year in foreign aid. Instead, we kept on threatening to invade Syria.
Lot of mixed messages. Foggy Bottom is aptly named.
I get it. In your mind, it was our fault. Blame America first. After all, we were not paying tribute money to the Assad family. And seriously, how is it our blow back? We didn’t create this army to subvert Iraq. Assad did. We didn’t transport them to Syria and onto Iraq to attack and kill Americans. Assad did. I know it’s hard to see it this way, but Assad and Iran killed Americans in Iraq to thwart our efforts there. So you can drop the Great Satan theory that everything is our fault.
“In 2003, the Damascus regime was panicked that then-US President George W. Bush, after his victory over Saddam Hussein, would have his troops continue into Syria to topple Assad as well. “
That line is in there pandering to European/liberal conventional wisdom - that the pigheaded reactionary policies of the bumbling Americans are the cause of the unrest of otherwise happy noble savages - assuring themselves that they are so much more sophisticated.
The truth is that the Syrian Ba’athist regime was an evil Anti-American gang long before George Bush was president. All our enemies are always looking for ways to make us fail. Any operation in the region will have to contest the efforts of many bad actors - it is an unavoidable cost of effecting change in that region.