The recently agreed fighting pause is a cause for celebration within the limited boundary of satisfaction at talks between engaged powers (but not the belligerents) all of whom want peace, but each of whom has a different view of what that peace should look like. We all know what Syrians towns look like, many of centuries standing and historic importance; they look like nothing on earth. Just piles of rubble and empty walls. Most of the population have either died or fled and millions are en route to Europe. The West makes itself feel better by accusing Russia of bombing civilians, when in truth fighters and innocents are entangled in the rubble as a deliberate means of combat employed by the so called moderates.
From the very beginning the West, which likes to draw lines in the sand, has drawn shapes that make no sense and has resulted in vast humanitarian suffering and the rise and rise of IS. There is no such thing as moderate opposition fighters. There are moderate opposition politicians who have a dream of a Syrian democracy, but they are not in Syria and they are not fighting. The moderate opposition fighters are a figment of Western wishful thinking. They fight among themselves, are driven by a lust for power and if they ever achieved it, would produce fractured and chaotic governance a good deal worse than pre-war Assad. Soon IS would be the dominant power in what would be little better than a bandit region.
If the opposition was indeed acting in the best interests of the Syrian people they would have stopped fighting long ago. It is clear this is a war comprehensively lost by all parties and has resulted in the mindless destruction of a country and the slaughter of up to half a million people. The West’s muddled strategy of good and bad enemies and outside the tent allies is hopeless. The Iranian/Russian approach of ending the fighting by brute force may sadly, very sadly, be the most humane way forward. That is a frightful indictment of a calamitous failure of politics, strategy, diplomacy, tactics and reason.