After five years of civil war, about 400,000 dead and the creation of more than 10m displaced persons and refugees, dozens of relatively junior US State Department officials have sent a memorandum to their bosses arguing that US policy towards Syria is failing and needs to change.
They communicated through the “dissent channel”, a mechanism created in the wake of the Vietnam war to ensure that mid-level diplomats could reach senior officials with views that challenged orthodoxy without fear of retribution. The channel is meant to be private but memos that disagree with prevailing policy have a tendency to become public.
The only surprise in all this is that broad internal opposition to US policy towards Syria has not surfaced earlier. There has long been a gap between the goals that the US has articulated and what it has been prepared to do to achieve them.