To borrow the climactic line from Easy Rider, "We blew it." Or, to be fully accurate, President Obama blew an unprecedented chance to aid Syria's then-moderate opposition back in 2011.

We could have helped end the monstrous Assad regime, gaining good will and practical advantage in a hopeful new state.

Now it's too late. And Obama may be ready to act at last. The result could be disastrous.

Strategy isn't only about doing the right thing, but about doing the right thing at the right time. Doing what appears to be the "right thing" too late often makes things worse.

How did the window for aiding the Syrian rebels close?

[This commencement address was originally published two years ago. We will rerun it annually at college graduation time. Feel quite free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.]

Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:

It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you've all reached the finish line:  college, goodbye, we're outta here.  Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end.

But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk such as this by saying funny things.  So I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies.  If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago.  His most famous movie was of course Gone With The Wind.

He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy.  It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost.  Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and triumphs.  Gable makes his exit, and after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget.

Serendipity is funny, a very funny thing, finding something where you least expect it.  Out of the blue, out of a movie awash with pedestrian dialogue, comes a line so profound it detonates inside your brain. Ryan turns to his men and says:

It was the summer of 1992.  Our youngest son, Jackson, had been born in May, and I was staying put, not traveling anywhere to remain at home to help take care of him.  A friend of mine named Ray Kline called.  Ray was a legendary intel guy in Washington, having been the Deputy Director of the CIA under John Kennedy, and later Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon).

It was Ray Kline who, in the fall of 1962, drove down the George Washington Parkway from Langley CIA headquarters to the White House, entered the Oval Office, and placed the satellite photos of the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba on Kennedy's desk to personally explain them to the President of the United States.

That's how the Cuban Missile Crisis began.

Ray was calling to tell me about a 30^th anniversary conference of the veterans of the Crisis he had just come back from.  The conference was in Havana, Cuba.

"You went to Cuba, Ray?" I asked, amazed.  "Jack, the Soviet Union has vanished off the map [December 1991] and a lot of Castro's people are nervous" he replied.  "They are trying to convince him to make his peace with the US.  They even asked me if I knew of a conservative organization that would send a delegation to Havana and talk to them."

Ray paused for effect.  "I suggested you and your Freedom Research Foundation."

"You've got to be kidding, Ray," was all I could say.

"Jack, Cuban intel knows all about how you instigated the Reagan Doctrine, which is why they no longer have their Soviet patron.  Who better than you to go and see if they are for real?"

I told him I would think about it.  I decided to go and told my wife, Rebel, my reason:  "I want to look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him that someday the Cuban people will urinate on his grave." 

She decided to go with me - in order to prevent me from doing any such thing.