“I have met with [Department of Defense] officials, I have looked at what the options — at what the way the civil war is going, at how fractured the opposition is, at how Al-Qaeda is a huge part of that opposition,” Smith explained. “And it’s not that I’m not sure. Right now, my position is, if we were to go in there and try to arm rebel groups, it would make the situation worse and there would be an enormous risk of us getting dragged into a war that we don’t know the first thing about how it would come out.”