​With focus on ISIS, Obama recalibrates aims in Syria

One year ago, President Obama delivered a prime time address from the White House to explain his strategy in Syria, keeping open the possibility of conducting airstrikes there. On Wednesday night, Mr. Obama will once again address the public about the turmoil in Syria and the surrounding region, and he may once again discuss the option of airstrikes.

Unlike last year, however, Mr. Obama won't focus on his plan to degrade the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, the president will be talking about a problem barely mentioned in last year's address: the rise of Islamic extremists that the administration now says pose a threat to U.S. interests.

Some critics, including even Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama's former secretary of state, have suggested that if the Obama administration had more aggressively armed the moderate rebels in Syria last year, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as ISIL) would have less of a foothold in the region.

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"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad--there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle--the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Clinton recently said.

Of course, with hindsight, the potential threat of ISIS may be more evident, and it seems to be growing more evident to Washington on a daily basis. Even Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, who just last month slammed Clinton for suggesting the U.S. take a more aggressive posture in Syria, now supports airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria.

"I don't think anyone at the start had any idea of just how serious the problems would become inside Syria," Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CBS News.

Since Mr. Obama's address last year, Assad has remained in power, though he buckled under international pressure and gave up his chemical weapons stockpile. The Obama administration has supported moderate rebels in Syria for more than a year, but the groups opposed to the Assad regime have fractured and largely lost momentum. Mr. Obama is now backing groups he was previously hesitant to support, namely the Free Syrian Army.

"The president viewed Syria as yet another quagmire to be avoided, even being unwilling to effectuate the fall of Assad," CBS News senior national security analyst Juan Zarate said. "He did not want to be dragged into another war and thought the rise of extremist groups, including those tied to al Qaeda and then ISIS, could be managed."

Many, including a number who felt differently a year ago, now think that providing more robust aid or even limited airstrikes would have made a difference in Syria, Cordesman said.

"Today it's brutally clear it's going to be very, very hard to recreate anything like a meaningful rebel moderate group, even if the U.S. makes much more effective use of air power against the Islamic state and works with others to provide arms," he said.

Should the U.S. step up its involvement in Syria, it will have to make sure the fall of Assad does not amount to victory for violent extremists.

"The fact is in this case, the enemy of our enemy is worse than our enemy," Cordesman said.

The extreme humanitarian crisis in Syria also complicates matters. After more than three years of conflict, nearly 200,000 people have been killed in Syria. There are about 10.8 million people in Syria who need humanitarian assistance -- around half of the country's population. With millions of refugees outside of Syria and millions more displaced within its borders, Cordesman called it "probably one of the most violent disruptions of a state in modern times."

Mr. Obama on Wednesday night will have to broach the quagmire in Syria, but that will take a backseat to the president's broader strategy to combat ISIS, said Paul Salem, a vice president at The Middle East Institute. For instance, the president will likely talk about the international coalition that is united against ISIS. He's also likely to stress the recent political progress in Iraq.

Few would have expected the Iraqi army to "melt away as fast as it did" over the summer, Salem said, allowing ISIS to gain momentum. But after the recent peaceful political transition in Iraq, there's reason to believe the nation's new leaders can work together to fight the extremists.

"In the long term, the Free Syrian Army needs to be stood up to start taking back territory from ISIS, but unlike in Iraq, that cannot happen tomorrow," Salem said.