How quickly fortunes change.
Five weeks ago, everyone said the rebels were winning the war in Syria. Having captured Aleppo, the country's largest city, having held Qusair, a vital link between Damascus and the Alawite port city of Latakia, and even having advanced from the southern reaches of the country to the outskirts of Damascus, surely it was only a matter of time before the regime of Bashar al-Assad folded, or so it was said.
Today, it's a different story. Government forces have captured Qusair; they're pushing the rebels back from Damascus in the South and preparing for an attack on Aleppo.
The government has "every confidence" of winning this war, Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad said Thursday.
But can anyone really talk about winning? With 93,000 dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, almost two million refugees in nearby countries, five million displaced persons inside Syria, and all this in a country of only 20 million people, isn't it a matter of how much everyone loses?
UNESCO this week warned that the six World Heritage sites in Syria now are listed as being "in danger." Across the border in Lebanon, it was announced that the annual Baalbek music festival was being relocated this year from its iconic Roman ruin site because of rocket fire and other incidents of spillover from the conflict in Syria.
Will there be anything left when one side or the other "wins" this war?
The Group of Eight industrial giants failed this week to agree on a plan for countering the Assad government. It's not just because one of the eight, Russia, supports the Assad regime, it's also because the other seven powers are, themselves, very ambivalent.
They're under some political pressure to act – to end the killing, to repatriate the refugees, to restore stability in the region (and also to break up the Iran-Syria-Lebanon axis). But if the goal is to end the killing and restore regional stability, why should it be by providing arms to the rebels?
No matter how many weapons are provided, the result will simply be more killing, more refugees and greater instability. It will not be enough to defeat the powerful Assad forces.
The rebels already receive a substantial amount of weapons from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. The degree to which additional U.S. or British weapons would strengthen the rebels would be more than offset by outside assistance to the Assad regime. To date, it's been Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia, that has come to the aid of Mr. Assad, but Iraq may be next to pitch in.
"We are doing our best to maintain a neutral position, but the pressures are enormous," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said on Thursday, "and for how long we can hold really is a matter of further developments in Syria."
Iraq already allows Iran to fly military supplies over Iraqi territory to Syria, and a growing number of Iraqi Shia fighters are believed to be making their way across the frontier to join the fighting in Syria, on Mr. Assad's side.
Why is this tolerated? Mr. Zebari was asked. "Not for any love for the [Assad] regime," he replied, "but out of serious concerns for Iraqi national interests."
Faced with such prospects and the futility of getting concerted action from the G8, British Prime Minister David Cameron is now proposing an alternative course of action: encouraging Syrian military officers to launch a coup against Mr. Assad. This week, the British leader offered such officers a deal: They would not be prosecuted for atrocities committed against the Syrian people if they overthrew their president.
Mr. Cameron imagines the Syrian military making common cause with the rebel Free Syrian Army, not only in replacing Mr. Assad but also in denying the Sunni Jihadists in the opposition ranks any chance of participating in a future government.
It's a stretch, but no crazier than several other ideas, and it has the virtue of not requiring Western governments such as his to convince their wary electorates of the need to arm the Syrian opposition forces, many of which are apt to turn on the West just as soon as the war in Syria is over.
The Cameron proposal is likely to be a major topic of discussion at Saturday's meeting of the Friends of Syria in Doha.
In commenting on the idea, a skeptical Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper asked "what happens if such efforts fail?"
"The only resort will be for Britain and its allies to invade," the pan-Arab paper concluded.