Given our record on deliberate regime change, our best “success” led to the Mullas in Iran, this is a good thing, but this hasn’t stopped the CIA from claiming that Obama stopped a program that could have prevented the rise of ISIS:

The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.

It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.

In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.

Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an “ops plan” that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting.

A former senior intelligence official said Laux’s ideas—many of them shared by other members of the CIA’s Syrian task force–were heavily represented in the plan that was ultimately presented to Obama.

But the president, who must approve all covert action, never gave the green light. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.

You may have noticed over the past few years that there are no “Moderate Syrian Rebels”, and there never have been.

Also, we know what happens when our quest for regime change hits reality, clusterf%$#s like Libya,

Also, when see that the plan was backed by David Petraeus, who turned the CIA into a drone based Murder, Inc., which served to generate more terrorists than it killed, the fact that Obama did not authorize this is a good thing.

Our moves toward regime change have never turned out well for us, or the citizenry of the nations where they are directed.