President Obama's plan to have the Pentagon create a rebel force in Syria, the “New Syrian Force”, has crashed and burned in such an spectacular way that the Administration is "rethinking" it's entire strategy.
Simply put, the $500 million plan was supposed to train 5,000 rebel fighters every year to battle ISIS in Syria. One year and $42 million later only 54 fighters were ready. Within a week after entering Syria they had been routed by al-Qaeda. Their commander was captured, several were killed, most of the the rest had vanished.
When General Austin was asked by the Senate how many fighters remained the results were embarrassing.

“We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd J. Austin III told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Austin heads Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, a position made famous by former General David Petraeus. Austin conceded that the rebel program is “off to a slow start.”
“That’s a joke,” Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican, responded.

Sorry Senator Ayotte, General Austin doesn't joke. But you can be forgiven for thinking he was joking because its not often you witness a program exploding like a supernova before collapsing into a black hole.
In fact, the implosion of our war strategy is so total and complete that a brand new scandal is threatening the Administration and Pentagon, a scandal that we've seen before - 'cherry-picked intelligence'.

It’s happening again. A White House fumbling with the violent mess of Iraq finds itself surrounded by mounting accusations that it’s played dirty games with intelligence. A Pentagon facing charges that its analysts have skewed assessments on Iraq to tell top policymakers what they want to hear, rather than what is really happening in that troubled country.
If this sounds terribly familiar, it should. Only a dozen years after the George W. Bush White House was buffeted by allegations that it had “cherry-picked” intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Barack Obama is facing similar accusations. Intelligence Community analysts alleged that, in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, they were pressured to exaggerate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, analysts claim that they have been pushed to present Obama’s war against the Islamic State as more successful than it really is.

It looks bad, and it is bad. Mostly because the charges are both believable and not very hard to prove. In fact, investigators have already been given documents proving that "senior military officers manipulated the conclusions of reports on the war against the Islamic State".
Who would have thought that the Obama Administration would have committed the exact same sin that the Bush Administration was guilty of, after Obama decided not to punish anyone for that sin?
This has led some people who have a long history of being wrong and feint shock and surprise.

“I’ve been a member of the committee for nearly thirty years, and I’ve never heard testimony like this—never,” John McCain said.

Actually Senator McCain, you have heard testimony like this before. In fact, almost exactly like this before.
Either old age or selective amnesia has robbed Senator McCain of the memory of the infamous Free Iraqi Forces.

On March 14, 2003, ARMY MAJ. GEN. David Barno gave a very enthusiastic press briefing from Camp Freedom, Hungary, where he announced that the Department of Defense was creating the Free Iraqi Forces "to assist U.S. and coalition forces in civil-military operations, should military action in Iraq be deemed necessary."
At the time of the announcement the program was already two months old, and the idea was to "train up to 3,000 over the calendar year". (Is this starting to sound familiar yet?)

Two weeks later the Iraqi exiles in the group were sent to the war zone and the program was quietly suspended, but not before Barno told everyone,"Our recent mission to train Free Iraqi Forces has been very successful."
A week later the conservative press told us how wonderful the Iraqi exiles were doing.

However, the whistle on this program had already been blown by the L.A. Times.

They're called the Free Iraqi Forces, and many of them sport paunches and gray-tinged mustaches. Their average age is 42...
The trouble is, only 21 men were in Friday's graduating class. A meager total of 74 have been trained so far in the program, which U.S. officials say may be doomed to insignificance because Iraqi dissident groups have failed to provide enough candidates to undergo training.
The program was approved last year and launched in January with much fanfare, a congressional mandate and more than $90 million to train and equip as many as 3,000 Iraqis. So few have been trained that some U.S. officials have taken to calling it the "million-dollar-a-man army."

Let's pause to do some quick math:

$90M / 74 = $1.21 million per man in the Free Iraqi Forces
$42M / 54 = $0.77 million per man in the New Syrian Force
Round 1 goes to Obama, for not spending as much on total failure.

However, the story doesn't end there.
Very soon afterwards, Iraq fell and the occupation started. Unlike the New Syrian Force, the Free Iraqi Forces were there to help.

Halting disorder and looting and restoring basic public services must be a priority for U.S. forces, opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi said April 13. He said this could be accomplished by deploying Free Iraqi Forces — of whom he said there were 1,200 in Iraq, but several thousand could be deployed quickly — in the affected cities.

Chalabi exaggerated how many men he had by about 99%. Nevertheless, his guys were there to help out when his country was falling apart.
So Round 2 goes to Bush...or at least it would, if it wasn't for this development just 10 days later.

U.S. troops arrested eight members of the Free Iraqi Forces after saying they were found looting abandoned homes of members of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime in Baghdad.
Some of the group's members were trained and transported to Iraq by the U.S. military.

Now to be fair, Chalabi did say that his forces would "help" with the looting. Which they did.
So if you look at it that way, he was doing what he said he would.

Therefore I'm giving Bush a Big "Mission Accomplished".