AP Photo

For more than a year now, the best minds in Washington have assured me (and you) that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is about to fall. These assurances are always delivered with great confidence, winks and nods oozing gravitas, and yet the wispy Assad, an ophthalmologist masquerading as a despot, hangs on, slaughtering his own people, destroying and despoiling whole neighborhoods, calling the bluff of the Arab League, the Turks and even the European Union, which just the other day — in a measure apparently intended to give Assad a fatal case of the giggles — banned his wife from shopping on the Continent. Sherman was right: War is hell.