Is Obama's aid to Syrian rebels too little, too late?

Secretary of State John Kerry this week promised $60 million in relief supplies to the Syrian National Coalition, marking the first time the Obama administration has agreed to directly aid the opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The money will go to "non-lethal" assistance, such as food and medicine, a fact that left rebel leaders underwhelmed. They had requested weapons, or at least military equipment such as vehicles and night-vision goggles, leaving some Middle East analysts to declare the help "too little, too late."

That's a fair assessment, according to Lee Smith at The Weekly Standard. The opposition knows what it will take to end the bloody, two-year fight to topple Assad, and they're disappointed because they know "the Free Syrian Army is not going to get what it needs" to do the job.

Other observers, though, think President Obama and his team are wise to take this cautious approach. "The administration is right," says The Los Angeles Times in an editorial. "Arming the rebels now would be a mistake."

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The trick is finding the right balance between being passive, and getting dragged too deeply into another war, says Greg Dobbs in The Denver Post. "No matter how ugly the war has turned in Syria" — the death toll now stands at an estimated 70,000 — "few if any Americans want to put our soldiers' boots on the ground there." There's still more we can do, though, that would be even more decisive than sending the rebels weapons. "It's called air power."