Really, it was potentially a brilliant idea. Use our enemies to go after our other enemies. Recruit Al Qaeda to take down Assad, and use ISIS to drive a physical wedge between Iran and Syria, isolating them from one another.
What seemed brilliant on paper didn’t work out so well in reality, as both halves of our proxy army started slaughtering Christians on camera for recreation. This was something that didn’t bother the Turks or the US State Department, but it was a PR disaster among ordinary Americans. I think the Saudis realized that before Obama did.
You would think that we could have simply told our proxies, in exchange for our help, money, and weapons, Christians living in your midst must be protected at all costs, or we’ll rain hell down on you from on high. But no one ever told them this out loud (was Obama going to deliver that message? Erdogan?) and so the Syrian civil war became a bloody disaster that no American could support. Obama and the Turks succeeded in doing what no one else could do, converting Assad into the good guy.
Washington doesn’t do proxies well. They usually come back to bite us in the backside:
1) Ho Chi Minh
2) Shah of Iran
3) Osama Bin Laden
4) Truiijlo (sp?) of Panama
5) Saddem Hussein
6) and the biggest failure - Adolf Hitler
Now we see the ISIS failure as yet another in a long string of proxy failures
We did not tell our ISIS proxys to leave the Christians alone because our Deep State under our Muslim leader hates Christians.
The Deep State would love to slaughter us here in America, that is why they spent so many millions of our tax dollars importing Muslims.