John Hudson reports that the administration recently acknowledged that the “moderate” opposition in Syria has no realistic chance of winning:

In a grim assessment of the U.S.-backed Syrian rebels, a senior State Department official said on Wednesday that the country’s armed opposition will not be able to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad now or in the foreseeable future, despite the existence of a Pentagon program to train and equip 5,000 rebels per year.

That’s not really news, since the real purpose of providing backing for the “moderate” opposition is to placate Sunni Arab members of the anti-ISIS “coalition” by maintaining the pretense that the U.S. desires regime change in Syria. The idea that the U.S. could successfully build up an effective “moderate” opposition capable of defeating the Syrian regime on its own was always absurd, but then this was never the point of demanding that the U.S. “arm the rebels.” Making this demand could either pave the way for escalation or make a show of “doing something” without having to make a larger commitment. Very few advocates thought that “arming the rebels” by itself would have any significant effect. For Syria hawks, arming part of the Syrian opposition was just the first step towards getting the U.S. more deeply involved in the conflict. Once the U.S. was a patron of at least some Syrian rebels, the hawks hoped that they could use that to bolster demands for direct intervention. For the administration, providing minimal aid to the opposition was a way to appear to be following through on the president’s careless rhetoric that “Assad must go” without necessarily committing the U.S. to a more aggressive policy. Now that the U.S. is bombing ISIS, offering some support to rebel groups in Syria helps the administration to pretend that it has something resembling a plan for the Syrian part of its ever-expanding and open-ended war. The fact that these groups aren’t capable of defeating regime forces or ISIS just reminds us that expanding the war in Syria was an enormous error on top of the original mistake of intervening in Iraq.