"Notably, the international community and particularly western powers, which were originally sympathetic to Syria's Arab Spring , accepted the Syrian regime as the lesser evil and gradually abandoned the opposition." Assad's strategic use of ISIL
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51