Robert Merry compares Washington’s muddled Syria policy with Russia’s:

Thus does U.S. policy in Syria appear to be a kind of diplomatic mishmash. The United States wants Russia’s involvement so it can exercise leverage on Assad, but it approaches possible talks in ways that deprive Russia of its leverage. It wants to bring forward “vetted” opposition groups, but it can’t be certain of what kind of actual influence such groups may have. It wants influence in unfolding events, but it isn’t willing to take the risky actions necessary to generate influence. It wants to ensure that dangerous weapons don’t fall into the hands of Islamist terrorists, but in frustration it will accept actions on the part of other nations that could place dangerous weapons into the hands of Islamist terrorists.

What this suggests is that there just may not be a significant role for the United States in this tragic war—absent a major military effort to alter the balance of power on the ground, which Obama correctly views as posing a political disaster for himself and his party.

There are a few things I would add to this. First, Russia was always going to have a relatively easier time of responding to the conflict in Syria because it was trying to preserve as much of the status quo as possible, and it didn’t have to risk very much to do this. In order for the U.S. to have a significant impact on the war in Syria in the way that Syria hawks wanted, it would have had to act aggressively and actively seek to overthrow a foreign government, which was necessarily a much more costly and complicated task. The policy that Syria hawks wanted required the U.S. to try to pursue a number of contradictory, mutually exclusive goals, which made the argument for intervention in Syria even more confused and unpersuasive than it already was. Syria hawks wanted to justify U.S. involvement on humanitarian grounds, but their proposals would have almost certainly contributed to intensified violence and prolonged conflict. The goals of protecting the civilian population and improving the opposition’s ability to wage war against the government were always directly in conflict with one another, and the fact that more than a few Syria hawks viewed the conflict primarily as a means to inflict harm on Iran further undermined the original argument for intervention. The administration never fully accepted these arguments, but it indulged them just enough to create avoidable confusion. The administration has continually tried to split the difference between elite advocates for military intervention and the overwhelming popular resistance to a new war, and in the process has managed to aggravate just about everyone over the last three years.

The U.S. has also vacillated between vilifying Russia for its support for the Syrian government and seeking its cooperation in negotiating an end to the war, which meant that the U.S. first alienated and insulted the government that it was then trying to rely on to “deliver” Assad. To the extent that the administration has half-heartedly accommodated the different pro-intervention arguments, it has produced a muddled Syria policy that can’t achieve much of anything, and it has been pursuing a diplomatic track mainly so that it can claim that it is still “doing something” about Syria despite the fact that there is virtually no chance of a negotiated end to the war in the foreseeable future. Instead of acknowledging early on that the U.S. would not be able to bring the conflict in Syria to a speedy conclusion, the administration has reluctantly pursued multiple contradictory courses that fail to deliver tangible results while they continue to entangle the U.S. in a conflict in which it has always had little or nothing at stake.