Yes, I would echo what Professor Legrenzi has said. We tried to put a fence around it. We tried to contain the Syria crisis. It failed following the ISIL outbreak into Mosul because the war inside Syria was never just about an uprising. It was about a regionalized sectarian proxy war. Already half of Syria's population is displaced with about two-thirds in neighbouring countries. I'd say that containment failed a long time ago. We can wish it were different, but it's not.
The best course of action, the safest one for Canada and the United States, is a policy of assertiveness, not aggression, but assertiveness. Assertiveness means being engaged, as Professor Legrenzi said. But it means not only being engaged diplomatically but the smart use of military force at the right time to push things in a direction that leads to a final settlement.
This is not the first time or probably the last time that the United States or Canada or Europe or its allies would be involved in such an effort. It is complex stuff but it is time well spent because without it, as Professor Legrenzi mentioned, we are not going to be lined up with our long-term interests.
Instead, we'll make ourselves more and more susceptible to anything from terrorist attacks to the effects of a regionalized sectarian war on energy prices and economic damage. Beyond the moral example that showed that to stand aside while so many people were slaughtered by their supposedly legitimate governments and we said we could do relatively little, we could have done much more.
I think probably the worst incident and the most shameful one was the non-strike incident of September 2013 when the United States laid down a red line in Syria concerning the use of chemical weapons and then walked away from it. I don't discount the fact that a large swath of Syria's chemical weapons had been removed. But a lot still remains unaccounted for and in the end, it didn't settle the conflict. It didn't necessarily make it safer for Syrians. Instead the Assad regime was given other options to try to blast their way out of this uprising that so far has proven the country's and the regime's largest challenge to date.