Blame-shifting is one of his great talents but this is a virtuoso performance. And not just because he’s trying to pawn off his failures as commander-in-chief, the most singular duty of the presidency, on others. It’s because one of those others he has in mind is none other than his own Democratic would-be successor, Hillary Clinton. It’d be like George W. Bush blaming Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and the myriad other hawks, Republican and Democrat, who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for somehow goading him into war.

At long last, my friends, we’ve reached Peak Obama.

[T]he White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain…

“How un-presidential that sounds — ‘We didn’t want to do it, we thought it was unsound but you made us do it,’ ” said [former ambassador Ryan] Crocker, now dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. “It’s just indicative of their whole approach to Syria, which is not to have a policy. This is the worst thing they could say.”

Right. What’s irritating Obama here is that he was destined for criticism no matter what he did. If he had listened to the Rubios and McCains and started building a U.S. proxy force of rebels early, circa 2011, some of those trainees would inevitably have switched sides. Some would have murdered civilians. Some, simply by fighting effectively, would have been accused of doves here in the U.S. of keeping the war going when all Syrian civilians wanted was peace. O would have been called a warmonger, repeating the alleged mistake the U.S. made in Afghanistan in the 1980s by arming the mujahedeen against the Soviets.

Meanwhile, if he’d done nothing at all — as opposed to next to nothing, which is what this modest, belated rebel training program amounts to — he’d be accused of not caring about Syria, of not lifting a finger of America’s massive military might apart from some ineffective bombing runs at ISIS to end the civil war there. All of the criticism he would have taken from doves if he’d intervened early would be reversed by hawks for refusing to intervene — an effective rebel force could have stopped ISIS before it gained momentum, it could have pressured Assad into accepting a peace deal and sectarian partition, and it could in theory have formed the germ of a new ruling regime that would have averted the Syrian refugee crisis. Rather than choose one of those two paths, intervening early or staying out, Obama chose the half-assed middle-ground option of training a small number of rebels when it’s too late for them to achieve anything meaningful. That makes zero sense strategically but there’s some logic to it if you assume Obama’s chief goal here was simply to reduce criticism of him and his administration. See, hawks? He’s building a rebel force. See, doves? It’s a really small force that’s mostly for show. Happy now?

Speaking of which:

There are now 9 US-trained fighters in Syria, #Centcom says, 11 more on the way

— Tara Copp (@TaraCopp) September 18, 2015

That’s nine rebels total, up from “four or five” earlier this week. So there you go. Progress.

The truly confounding thing for O about Syria, I think, is that there’s no clear liberal position on it so he can’t take a firm stance and feel comfortable that he’ll have hacks in his own party to shield him from flak. The Iran deal, in a sense, is easy: Of course you take whatever you can get diplomatically from the rogue Middle Eastern state with nuclear ambitions. That’s the left’s lesson from Iraq, right? Jaw-jaw is always better than war-war, no matter how much you need to give away to keep it going. Syria, however, is hard. The last thing a guy who got elected by opposing the Iraq war wants to do is build some new American-backed fighting force in Mesopotamia. On the other hand, advisors like Susan Rice and Samantha Power strongly support humanitarian military interventions to protect vulnerable populations at risk of mass murder by their own rulers. That’s how we ended up with the modern-day paradise known as post-Qaddafi Libya. All of that being so, what’s Obama to do? Go all in with military force in Syria to protect the locals from Assad and ISIS, knowing that he’s risking a quagmire that would make Iraq pale by comparison? Or stay far away and watch the death toll climb well into six figures, with many millions more displaced and fleeing the region for the EU? There’s no obvious approach for a liberal who’s worried about his legacy and needs support from congressional Democrats to take. Except this, of course: It’s all your fault.