But "this" never came and the sense of betrayal that was always there took further hold. With his seemingly eager compliance on chemical weapons, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was looking more like a partner than an enemy, prompting John Kerry, in yet another classic Kinsley gaffe, to give "credit" to the dictator. Perhaps Assad didn't "need to go" after all.

For some time, members of both the military and political opposition had wondered whether the United States was really on their side. It was Foreign Policy's Daniel Drezner who, in June, put the pieces together and popularized the idea that a bloody stalemate in Syria wasn't evidence of the administration's failure but its success. It sounded awfully cynical at the time, but the Obama administration did, in fact, fear an outright rebel victory. And, more recently, American officials have made the unstated rather explicit, telling the Washington Post that the CIA's efforts to train Syrian rebels were meant to be limited and ineffectual. The goal, the Post reported , was "to provide enough support to help ensure that politically moderate, U.S.-supported militias don't lose but not enough for them to win."

From the very beginning, U.S. officials worried about the unintended consequences of arming the rebels. Even after President Obama authorized the provision of arms to "vetted" groups, it was on such a minimal scale as to be meaningless. And, in any case, the U.S. still refused to provide the heavy weapons the rebels said they needed to counter the Assad regime's artillery and aircraft. Part of the problem was that too many of the rebels seemed to be Islamists and some of these Islamists were part of the very umbrella command that the U.S. was supposed to be supporting. But the unwillingness to support the SMC in a serious, sustained fashion backfired, pushing "swing Islamists" to go their own way and form a separate, though still loose alliance. Moreover, it has made the Syrian National Coalition, effectively the political opposition-in-exile, even more irrelevant than before. As Lister notes, "the scope for Western influence over the Syrian opposition has now been diminished considerably."

In what could be the epitaph for America's Syria policy, "do no harm" did harm: not doing more to support the rebels helped shift the balance toward Islamists, which, in turn, made the U.S. less willing to support the rebels. Of course, it's not all bad news for the United States—assuming, of course, we're willing to draw distinctions between different kinds of Islamists. Most groups in the Islamic alliance would be considered "extreme" by U.S. standards insofar as their commitment to applying sharia law and anti-minority rhetoric are concerned. But judging them in the context of Syria rebel politics, "extremist" makes less sense, since there's a real qualitative difference between, say, Liwa al-Tawhid and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabha al-Nusra. It is not fashionable to make these distinctions in Washington, but that doesn't make them any less real. ("Moderates" versus "extremists" was always the wrong way to look at it).