British jihadists in Syria are playing into Assad's hands

"Syrians clearly have the right to defend themselves against Assad's brutal response to what began as peaceful calls for democracy. And, notwithstanding the moral and practical preferability of nonviolent struggle, an argument can be made that only force could ever topple a regime with a core as formidably solid as this one."
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with David Wearing's piece. A lot of people in the pro-solidarity crowd will dispute his assignment of a low probability to the idea that the worst Islamist group is a régime tool (and the claim needn't be that strong, if there isn't control, that they never attack each other shows commonality of interest). He doesn't address the question of the more secular groups receiving the arms they need, and, "those wealthy states who were agitating for military intervention last autumn", just isn't true, the trips to Congress and parliament to pass the buck were to enable Obama and Cameron to appear to have done what they could, without risking any political capital in trying to do anything whatsoever about Assad's mass murder with chemical weapons. And the real military intervention in Syria is by Russia and Iran and Hezbollah, blah, blah, blah.
But the rest is good.