As new wave of dispossessed thousands in flight from the fighting around Aleppo arrive on the Turkish border in desperation and despair, we may well ask ourselves if this can ever end? The answer is yes it will, but we do not know when and it would have ended already, or even not begun, had the West not continued with its serial misjudgment of strategic foreign policy. The cardinal rule is that the fabric of the State must initially be preserved in order that it may then be reformed. If the State is destroyed, chaos follows. We discovered this in Afghanistan and Iraq. We refused to believe it would happen in Libya and blundered in, gleeful at the fall of Gaddafi. The State collapsed into banditry and chaos.
So when militant Sunnis in Syria misjudged the West’s resolve and imagined that air support would be given if they began a violent uprising against Assad, western politicians were caught out. The hawks among them and their military knew that their people had had enough and would not back them. Instead of altering their tactics to ensure that civil war did not break out, they encouraged the insurrection but withheld military aid, supposing that Assad would fall. Yes, well…
The worst possible things then happened. An armed uprising which lacked the cohesion and strength to overthrow Assad, a regime too strong to fall but not strong enough to prevail and the arrival in the mayhem of first Al Qaeda and then Islamic State. The suffering of the innocent in this raging fight is so appalling as to represent a grand war crime for which the West holds joint responsibility at the very least.
Now Russia is involved and its aim is clear cut and unambiguous. The State must stand, and until the fighting ends there can be no meaningful plan for the future. Anyone still fighting who opposes the state is a terrorist and therefore an enemy. Anyone who stops fighting will be included in the settlement. Talks are organised and suspended in which there are two fundamental positions and a good deal of soft centre out of which some kind of compromise might be molded. The two positions can be summed up as Assad must go and the Regime or State must remain intact. That is quite a gap. It is not surprising that the only thing going anywhere is a new wave of refugees.