For the better part of three years it had been apparent that Assad’s propaganda was aimed at luring the West into a sordid compact with his regime founded on supposedly shared counterterrorism principles. According to this narrative, his victims, some of them as young as a few months old, were suicide bombers and head-loppers, akin to the fanatics who brought down the World Trade Center and left a crater in the side of the Pentagon. If United States learned just one lesson from a decade of fighting sacred terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be that “secular” Syria was its true ally against Gulf-abetted Sunni fundamentalism. (It mattered not at all that this elaborate courtship ritual competed with the more workaday premise out of Syrian state media organs that Washington was a grand conspirator working with Riyadh and Jerusalem in trying to fell the last great citadel of Arab anti-imperialism.)