Clichés are clichés, but sometimes it really is hard to see the forest for the trees. In the case of Syria, the "trees" include the UN debate between Obama and Putin over Syria and the fight against Islamic extremism, Russia's sudden military intervention in Syria, the failure of the U.S. training and assist missions in both Syria and Iraq, and the developing scandal in USCENTCOM over exaggerated claims of success for the U.S.-led air campaign in Syria and Iraq.
The most important "tree," however, is trying to negotiate an end to the fighting from the outside, as if Assad was the key issue and as if it would be possible for some diplomatic elite or mix of power brokers to bring Syria back to some state of stability if only Assad would agree to leave and the United States and Russia could agree on how to approach the negotiations.
Focusing on the Trees When the Forest is Burning
The problem is that the "forest" is dying, burning, and occupied by four broad sets of fighters that have little reason to cooperate with any UN-led negotiating effort, outside agreement over Assad - with or without U.S. and Russian cooperation.
To shift from one cliché to another, Syria presents far more problems than Humpty Dumpty. "All the king's horses and all the king's men" couldn't put Syria back together by negotiating a solution from the outside even if there was one King instead of a divided mix of the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, the other states surrounding Syria, the Arabian Gulf states, Egypt, and France and the other interested European powers.
It shouldn't take a child's nursery rhyme to point out the obvious - although it is one whose origins may date back to England's civil wars and first appeared in print shortly after it became fully clear that there was no way the English could ever bring the 13 colonies back under its control. To begin with, there is no equivalent of Humpty.
Putting Four Humptys Together with No King and No Unity Among the King's Men
The problem is not simply ISIS or Assad. ISIS is one of the four "Humptys" in a shattered Syria, but ISIS controls only a limited part of Syria's population even in the east. ISIS occupies both parts of Syria and Iraq. It continues to systematically purge any religious and ideological dissent while neither government in Damascus or the government in Baghdad have shown any clear ability to gain support from a major portion of the Sunnis in the area that ISIS controls.
So far, neither the forces of the Syrian or Iraqi government have had much military success against ISIS, and U.S. claims that Iraq has regained some 35% of the territory it lost to ISIS are little more than dishonest spin. They are based on the maximum line of ISIS advance before any fighting took place and before ISIS established any level of governance or control. They include vast areas of unpopulated desert: areas where no one controls anything because no one is there.
The Kurds
The second Humpty consists of the Syrian Kurds - who have gone from a partially disenfranchised minority to the equivalent of a mini-state in the north and east of Syria, and have been the only real U.S. military train and assist success. They have no reason to support Assad or any of those who support Assad. They too are divided, and some have ties to Turkish Kurds, some to Iraqi Kurds, some to both, and some are independent.
At the same time, they have no clear economic viability as a state, face growing water problems, and would need to grab a significant part of Syria's limited oil and gas resources in the East to be viable unless they somehow united in a broader Kurdish entity - one that included Turkish and/or Iraqi Kurds and would be likely to create a new set of regional conflicts.
Furthermore, these Administration claims and maps that talk about liberating 35% of the area that ISIS occupied ignore the fact that control of much of the disputed populated areas in Anbar remains undecided, and that it was the Iraqi Kurds which not only recovered much of the lost populated areas that did matter, but grabbed a large additional part of Iraq - including Kirkuk and its oil fields - and created a whole new dimension of the Kurdish problem and its tensions with Iraq's Arab and the Turks while the corrupt government in the Kurdish zone of Iraq has divided and threatened to create a new round of internal power struggles.
The Other Sunni Fighters
The third Humpty consists of an uncertain coalition of other Sunni fighters. They control - or are fighting for control - in many of the most populated areas in Syria. There are no reliable unclassified estimates of the number, strength, and ideological character of these factions but there are well over 20 groups - and some estimates go well over 30.
