James Jeffrey: “Our top-line goal for a Syria that we and the international community can live with is one that does not support…”

He has shown little willingness to be flexible on any issue, and at the moment may be concluding that it is better to sit on a pile of rubble with half his population and 60 percent of his country than to compromise.

What we got was a marginal product. It also does the job for 10 years of keeping them a year away from having a nuclear capability if they adhere to it.

You are always facing the possibility of something that approaches ethnic cleansing to essentially get borders shaped so that only your kind of people are in those borders.

We would do everything short of military force to try to hold off a Turkish incursion.