<i>&gt; when we did nothing</i><p>&quot;We&quot; didn&#x27;t do &quot;nothing&quot;. Countries like France, Israel, US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia spent years destabilising Assad and funding those &quot;opposition groups&quot; that eventually started the civil war. Syria originally was a USSR satellite with ambitions of regional hegemony (they basically ruled Lebanon and deeply influenced Jordan), so they had to be beaten into submission. However, there was never a real plan to get involved on the ground, that was just a huge bluff; Assad and Putin saw right through it. &quot;We&quot; (and French elites above all) did <i>way too much</i> already, and it&#x27;s high time we stopped.<p><i>&gt; The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict</i><p>That&#x27;s really rich. &quot;Our&quot; best ally in the region is an absolutist monarchy running an Islamist totalitarian regime, the US just sold them a new crapload of weapons... nobody gives a shit about that stuff. What &quot;we&quot; care about is that the &quot;right&quot; totalitarian mofo is in charge, like in Egypt. Everything else is theatre and propaganda.<p>The real solution is less weapons and more diplomacy. Get the interested parties in a room and throw away the key until they come up with a shared plan. The US&#x2F;Russia agreement is a first step in that direction, next it&#x27;s for Saudi, Turkey and Iran to work out an agreeable compromise and pull their weight in the right direction. Otherwise, until countries like Turkey and Saudi keep buying IS oil and selling them weapons, you can invade a thousand times and achieve nothing except increasing shareholder value in the defence sector.