Both sides have suffered about 100,000 killed. Both sides have killed civilians.

Ignoring truth is not peace making. We have to deal with reality. There is evil on both sides. Dictators do not have a special right to rule.

If you have evidence that it is a 50/50 proposition, I would be interested to see it. If you believe that both sides are equally evil you are entitled to your opinion.

Having uncontested air superiority, the planes and helicopters to take advantage of it and the willingness to bomb civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately raises the death toll very quickly.

The lastest beltway line, who is the enemy today?

Assad operates according to the "Hama Rules", for sure, but so does everybody else involved in the conflict, and it was always the case that he would fight to the last man, and he has always had the support of Iran and Russia to rely on, for reasons which are also obvious. The idea that we should pick a side in the conflict in order to "solve" it is part of the problem. To solve it you will have to address the underlying issues of resource depletion, food insecurity, and drought, and there we have no clue. And guess what, it's coming to Europe now, and soon to visit us here in the USA, this problem, this is just the beginning of population movements. Globalization indeed!

Is there anything positive we could do to help stop all the killing?

We and the UK could do that by freezing Saudi and GCC funds. But we won't. If we did, the Russians would do the same with the regime.

in the wisdom and compassion of Russia's Syria policy.

Military exports to Syria are huge, precisely at the time that Russia's economy needs the export income. Russia did not limit support for Assad even before ISIS existed. Nor did it limit military exports to Syria in 2011 when it was the Syrian army vs. protesters. Russia's MIC is no more to be trifled with than is the American version.

Assad's forces spend little time attacking ISIS anyway. His military attacks other rebel groups, and the towns and neighborhoods they control, while these groups are battling ISIS.

You don't really wonder why the Russians want to hold onto their last ally in the region? If the US wanted to broker a deal thst involved containing the Sunni Arabs the Russians would go for it in an instant. But we won't.

However less guns and ammo and more water and food and stuff like that would be a step in the right direction, the people aren't going to stay put without some basic forms of security. And we need to stop picking sides, it's not our fight, we want them to get along, not to have one win and drive out the others. The larger question of how to restore order, I don't think there is anything you can do that does not have it's own problems, but getting all the major outside players (Russia, EU, China, Iran, etc.) together and threatening them with invasion, occupation, and war crimes trials comes to mind. I think that might be possible, put Kerry and Lavrov on it.

in fact it's getting hard to tell who the sides are any more in some parts of Syria. It's dissolving into a bunch of local arguments, there isn't much command and control outside of the government controlled areas, and there is plenty of disorder there too.

It is amusing that they are fighting over the "safe zone".

Comparing two evils and putting them in some kind of scale is pointless, unless you want to keep the evil alive!

How is Assad any more evil than the murderous generals that seized power in Egypt, or the murderous Saudis that are committing mass murder of civilians in Yemen, not to mention countless human rights crimes in a systemic basis?! Somehow those guys get away with the evil and are given a pass by the very same media?

America always needs a bogeyman to justify it's criminally huge military.

Recognizing evil is not creating "bogeymen". Dealing with evil requires recognizing its existence, whether that evil is found in our own 1% or abroad.

Perhaps you fear that the only way to deal with evil is with the military. If that were true it might be good policy to just ignore the evil, "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" and hope that it goes away or, at least, just bothers other people.

We confronted the evil of a minority apartheid government successfully without using the military. It takes longer than a military "solution" but the result is more lasting.