The massacre in Paris has exposed the bankruptcy of Western policy towards the so-called Islamic State and the war in Syria and Iraq. This has long had an Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it, with Western leaders claiming they “believed six impossible things before breakfast”.

These impossible things included the belief that it would be possible to contain and even destroy IS, while at the same time getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad and his regime in Damascus. The US, Britain, France and their allies have refused to admit that the fall of Assad would create a power vacuum that would be inevitably be filled by Islamic fundamentalists from IS or al Qaeda clones such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.

What this strategy has meant on the ground is that when IS attacked the Syrian army in Palmyra in May the US air force did not bomb its fighters because Washington did not want to be accused by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies of helping Assad.

The result was a victory for IS as it seized Palmyra, beheaded captured Syrian soldiers and advanced westwards close to the crucial north-south highway linking Damascus to the northern cities.

Western leaders have said they do not have to choose between IS and Assad, because there is a moderate opposition prepared to fight both.

The mythical nature of this claim was revealed earlier this year when a US general admitted that it had just four such “moderate” fighters in Syria after spending $500 million on training them. Others had either defected to Jadhat al-Nusra or been murdered by it.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have since tried to re-brand these al Qaeda-type groups as being preferable enemies to IS, though this may be difficult to argue in future given al-Nusra’s enthusiastic endorsement of the slaughter in Paris.

The only way to defeat IS is to create a coalition of those who are demonstrably fighting it. There is a myth that Russia and the Syrian army are not doing so but Syrian soldiers supported by Russian air strikes won a significant victory over IS last week by breaking its siege of Kweiris military air base east of Aleppo, where 2,000 Syrian soldiers had been under attack by IS for months.

If the Russians had really only been launching air strikes against Syrian moderates and not against IS, it is unlikely that IS would have gone to such trouble to place a bomb on a Russian plane leaving Sharm el-Sheikh that killed 224 passengers.

Air strikes require a partner on the ground to identify targets to be effective. The US air campaign over the past year has only had real success when conducted in close co-ordination with Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq. Western “boots on the ground”, in the words of that terrible cliché, are not necessary or desirable but local military partners are a necessity.

Such a partnership should include Russia, Iran, the Syrian army, the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, Hezbollah, the Iraqi army and the Shia militias in Iraq. A military coalition rather than a diplomatic one is required if we are to end the butchery we have just seen in Paris, Beirut, Sinai, Ankara and Baghdad.