Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve, Parole! Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, Words! Charles Baudelaire Even as the war in Syria (more like the war on Syria, as squabbling foreign powers try to plot the country’s future) rages on, something has changed. In 2013, John Kerry was predicting that the Syrian secular…