Originally Posted by
etudiant
Why are they still in Syria, trying to overturn the government?
Possibly because :
1. There was this little thing called "the Arab Spring" during which numerous arab populations decided that they were less than content with the way their countries were being ruled. One of them was Syria, where Assad junior decided his response to this would be to use WMD on his civpop. The West rather understandably took a dim view of this and began supporting his opponents
2. Spillover from the ISIS palaver, complicated by ongoing interference from Iran, Saudi, Turkey and Russia, which poured fuel onto the existing civil war, resulting in huge displacement of the civpop that hadn't been gassed and an ongoing refugee crisis in the Med and beyond.
Does the west have a realisable end-game? Different question.