The Syrian civil war is a complicated, convoluted, FUBAR situation.
Without a solution to it, the refugee crisis won't end, the slaughter will continue, and Islamic jihadists will have a safe haven to export their deadly trade.

So what's the solution?
1) We could continue the current strategy of "do something", which involves dropping some bombs and giving weapons to "moderate" rebels, but that's been going on for over a year and it's now becoming obvious to even the average American that it isn't working.

2) There are the peace talks in Vienna. A transition plan was agreed to, which sounds promising.
However, there are several problems with the plan:
a) The Syrian exile group in attendance called the plan unrealistic
b) No actual Syrians were invited, which makes one wonder what peace did they have in mind
c) ISIS and the al-Qaeda alliance that hold almost 70% of the country aren't included in this plan. Ahrar al-Sham, declared that they would consider the participation by any rebel troop in the peace talks as “treason”.

3) We could take the advice of someone who knows what they are doing. General John Allen (Ret.), Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, said this

“If we don’t get at those issues over the long term, not just be compelled to constantly be fighting the symptoms of the problems, which is al Qaeda and which is Daesh - if we don’t get to the left of those symptoms and try to solve these underlying circumstances, working collaboratively with those who are in the region, who best understand the region, then we’re going to be condemned to fight forever.”

Long-term issues? Like the political, cultural and economic issues of the region? Boring stuff like working to make people's lives better, winning hearts and minds, and ensuring peace and prosperity?

America doesn't do that! America opens cans of whoopass,so get a job, hippie!

Fortunately, Senators McCain and Graham have come up with a fourth solution that involves all the things that make America great:
1) a quick fix
2) a catchy sound bite
3) throwing money at the problem
4) rewriting history

McCain and Graham are calling for a New Surge.

American boots on the ground.
That was the call from Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham on Monday as they pushed for President Barack Obama to send U.S. forces to fight ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
"The surge worked, we had it under control," McCain told Chris Cuomo during an interview on CNN's "New Day" in a joint appearance with Graham.
"Call in those people that are really the most respected in America and the world," he added, naming former Gen. David Petraeus as one. "They'll give him a strategy."

YeeHaw! Gonna Surge on them bad boyz!

Surprisingly, McCain and Graham actually have a worthy idea....with one small catch.
A Syrian Surge might get positive results if we actually repeat the historical events of the Iraqi Surge, and not the fictional Bush "Surge" that has no connection with reality.

The Myth of the Bush Surge goes something like this:

Against political pressure from the Democratic Cheese-Eating, Surrender-Monkeys, a Heroic President Bush added 20,000 troops, and extended the duration of the troops already in Iraq temporarily.
In response, the Iraqi terrorists were defeated, the war was won, and freedom and apple pie triumphed over Democrats.

Or something like that.
Why after four years of fighting a temporary 20% increase in troops was supposed to accomplish this was never explained, and never will be.

There's just one little problem with this idea that Bush won the Iraq War.
That problem is the word "won".

You see, normally people can't declare a war to be "won" until the enemy is defeated and the fighting is over.
When you try to apply the word "won" to the Iraq War you run into two basic problems:
a) the enemy wasn't defeated, and
b) the fighting wasn't over.

For starters, 395 troops died after The Surge ended in 2008.

The thing I can't figure out is how the Republican Party, which firmly believes that the only way to conduct wars is to kill the bad guys until there are no more bad guys to kill, can declare the Iraq War "won" at the end of The Surge, when obviously we hadn't killed all the bad guys.
The bad guys weren't even aware that they had lost.

“The surge didn’t ‘win’ anything. It bought time.”
-retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger

The reality is that violence continued to escalate during The Surge for months until three things happened:
1) Muqtada_al-Sadr ordered his shia militias to stand down in late August when fighting between the various shia factions started getting out of control.
2) The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was largely over by mid-2007.
It should be noted that America had a hand in that as well. Not in a good way.

“Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.
The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.
The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.” (“Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres”, Guardian)

However, the biggest change is the one thing that almost never gets talked about.
3) We put the Sunni rebels on our payroll.
Or to put it another way:
We paid them not to shoot at us.

The Awakening groups emerged in 2005 when Sunni tribesmen, who had previously fought the US military and Iraqi government forces, allied with US forces, accepting arms, money and training.
There are about 100,000 Awakening fighters in Iraq and analysts say they are one of the main reasons for the recent marked reduction in violence in the country.

The insurgents became our mercenary allies.

There was indeed a dramatic decline in violence during The Surge. Republicans like to say it was because of a small, temporary bump in troops numbers.
But what did Iraqis think?

In 2008, only 4 percent of Iraqis said additional US forces were responsible for the decline in violence.

The poll also found that 61% of Iraqis thought that the presence of American troops actually worsened the security situation.
But then what do they know. They only lived there.

So if more American troops aren't the solution, what is?
The most successful part of the Iraqi Surge was paying our enemy not to shoot at us.
We can do that again!
It would be cheaper than bombing them and we could pretend we are winning because we have larger genitals, just like we did in Iraq.

I know what some of you might think. It would be wrong and irresponsible to give terrorists money to not shoot at us.
I have an answer for that: Get a job, hippie!

First of all, giving money to people we were calling terrorists just months before was the Bush Surge by definition.

Secondly, our Gulf state allies have been the primary source of arms and funding for the terrorists for years. Plus, the CIA has been training al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists for years. Our troops even share a military base with a terrorist group that also cuts prisoners heads off and sometimes burns them alive.
But then since we torture people to death too, we can hardly judge those allies, amirite?

Finally, I want to refer back to what McCain said:

"Call in those people that are really the most respected in America and the world," he added, naming former Gen. David Petraeus as one. "They'll give him a strategy."

It turns out that Gen. David Petraeus already has a plan, and you are going to love, love, LOVE IT!

Members of al Qaeda’s branch in Syria have a surprising advocate in the corridors of American power: retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus.
The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.
The heart of the idea stems from Petraeus’s experience in Iraq in 2007, when as part of a broader strategy to defeat an Islamist insurgency the U.S. persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with al Qaeda and to work with the American military.
The tactic worked, at least temporarily. But al Qaeda in Iraq was later reborn as ISIS, and has become the sworn enemy of its parent organization.

It's absolutely brilliant. Brilliant I say!
Just pay "moderate" al-Qaeda jihadists to fight ISIS. Not only did it work for Bush's Surge, it fixed Iraq for all time.
And now we are going to fix Syria too. Although it makes you wonder why 82% of Syrians blame the United States for ISIS and why the CIA says this idea won't work.

There is nothing about how we've conducted ourselves over the last 14 years to suggest that we have a long-term plan for winning this war, that we can even define victory, or that we can even define our enemies. So if the best victories we can hope for are ephemeral phantoms, giving our enemies pallets of cash to stop shooting sounds like a win-win to me.