The essential truth about Syria is that no one apart from Iran knows what they are doing. This isn’t an admission of incompetence. It is a recognition that there are so many different actors in the conflict, so many moving parts to any solution, and so many different linkages with other conflicts and sociopolitical challenges in the wider region, and that so much stuff just happens (such as the shooting down of a Russian fighter plane) that it is impossible to construct a line of argument that has conclusively persuasive evidential or empirical support. To put it another way, you can argue from similar premises to a range of different conclusions.
So some will say that we should steer well clear. This conflict is essentially a civil war and can be resolved only by fighters on the ground. We need to watch and wait – rather as Israel (for instance) is presumed to be doing. Others say it might be a civil war but it also has significant transnational dimensions, both ideologically through the Islamist International and materially through the actions of those states that sponsor certain actors, ranging from the Shia militias that fight alongside Bashar al-Assad to the various Sunni militias that fight Assad, Hezbollah and Iran as well as, frequently, each other. We should therefore seek to shape the outcome by judicious intervention on the side of those groups that we wish to have a decisive say in the political aftermath. Still others say that we should seek primarily to destroy Islamic State – Da’esh – and if this entails a pragmatic alliance with Assad and Iran, that is the price we need to pay. Others protest that this will merely bolster the recruiting power of Da’esh and its Sunni jihadi Islamist analogues. We need instead to focus on containing them and making the removal of Assad and the political reconstruction of Syria a priority: Da’esh will only be defeated ideologically by a new, more stable and inclusive political dispensation, in Iraq as much as Syria.
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