There is some evidence that the tide of the Syrian civil war may be turning against Bashar al-Assad, with a number of analysts predicting his defeat. Walter Russell Mead thinks this would be a good thing:

The defeat of Assad remains the best thing that could happen in a Middle East in crisis. A signal defeat for Iran in the heart of the region would help restore a balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites that just might be the basis of a new regional order. When Saddam Hussein, a nominally secular dictator who ensured the dominance of Iraq’s Sunni minority, fell, Iraq flipped to the Shiite camp. That could have worked out if the United States had been willing to stick around in Iraq and help it find a path that was not aligned with Iran. But when the Obama administration’s premature withdrawal left the country with no realistic alternative to falling into orbit around Iran, the regional balance was thrown into disarray. The perception that the United States was tilting toward Iran further destabilized the Sunni world, leading both to the weakening of longstanding U.S. alliances and to rising sympathy for radical Sunni groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda as Sunnis circle the wagons and prepare for sectarian war.

This is where regime change in Syria could help. Assad’s regime is . . . nominally secular but in fact ensures the dominance of a small Shiite-aligned Alawite community over a majority Sunni population—so its fall, and its knock-on effects in Lebanon, where the pro-Iran Shiite political movement would be gravely weakened by the collapse of its longtime protector and ally in Damascus, would go a long way toward redressing the sectarian imbalance across the region. If the Shiites and Iranians control both Iraq and Syria, they will also dominate Lebanon and, many Sunnis worry, the region. But if Syria flips to the Sunnis, the books balance, more or less.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.