Well, Syria is particularly intractable, but let me say this first. What are those Iraqi troops, which in our best-case scenario are able to reconquer all of Iraq in 2015, going to do once they feel that they are in a position to control the territory that is now controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq? If they go back to doing what they were doing before the Islamic State came on the scene, which was to terrorize the local population, to marginalize it from a political point of view, and to extract money at checkpoints, then maybe it will not be ideal, but you can be sure that within two or three years we will have another insurgent group that will spring up.
I guess that is the easier part of the answer, but it's very important, as I said, because these are Canadian lives and Canadian taxpayers' money that is being poured into this operation.
When it comes to Syria, the situation, as the other witness correctly stated, is a lot more complex. There will be tough choices to be made in terms of how far you want to go in the direction of finding a political agreement with a regime that everybody—not the regime itself, but certainly everybody in Canada and the United States—hoped would collapse pretty soon but then instead proved quite resilient. I certainly do not have a clear answer for that, but it will be a much harder choice to be made down the road.