Will latest Syrian ceasefire work?

The US and Russia have struck a new truce after another round of marathon diplomacy between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Effective September 12, Assad will stop bombing rebel-held areas while Washington will join Moscow's air campaign against Al Nusra Front as well as ISIS.

For the US, a deal was very badly and urgently needed for the second time in little more than half a year, as its rebel proxies were again on the verge of complete defeat in and around the strategically crucial city of Aleppo, which over the course of 2016 has become the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year conflict. Though this latest cessation of hostilities arguably buys time once more for the stubborn insurgency against Assad to recover and gather strength for the next round of fighting, one can easily see why the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers could use a breather, as well.

Putin and Assad will seek to use the truce to lock down their renewed encirclement of rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which has just been reimposed in recent days after a month-long breach by Al Nusra and its allies.  Given how dangerously exhausting the back-and-forth fighting around the city has been in the last two months for his badly overextended army, Assad has good reason to bring his expenditures of blood and treasure down to a bare minimum, while securing as much political cover as possible for his hard-fought, then forfeited, and then finally recovered territorial gains. By finally joining forces with Russia against Al Nusra, the US has signaled that it has overruled rebel aspirations to militarily wrest the city from the regime, as such an effort has become utterly dependent on Al Nusra and its extremist affiliates.

Instead, the remaining secular and "moderate" Islamist opposition must now dissociate completely from the fanatical jihadists whose battlefield prowess has made them increasingly popular with their own constituents. This could be a major stumbling block to renewed peace negotiations at Geneva. However, it's one thing to admire Al Nusra diehards because they give pro-regime forces such hell; it's something else altogether to actually join them. Both Moscow and Washington must be hoping that their alliance against Al Nusra, even if hazy on the specifics, will at least force on all Sunni jihadists a choice of whether to throw in their lot with an implacable aspiring emirate (or even caliphate) or instead take a gamble on a political process that restricts their leverage against the Syrian regime.

It's precisely this loss of precious leverage - given how prominent Al Nusra has become to the whole anti-Assad insurgency - that was clearly the biggest objection raised by those elements in the Washington bureaucracy, that is to say the CIA and the residual neocon holdouts of the State and Defense Departments, against any deal with the Kremlin whatsoever. On the surface, the very fact that this agreement actually pulled through at all is an initial indication of their crushing defeat.

More realistically, though, since Kerry deliberated intensively and for hours on end with the agreement's US governmental stakeholders - read: the neocon bureaucrats - before giving Lavrov the final go-ahead, these sore losers grilled him mercilessly to try to tweak the implementation of the new truce yet again against the Russians. In fact this is definitely why it took so long: one can easily imagine the vicious back-and-forth wrangling between poor Kerry and CIA director John Brennan as well as Defense Secretary Ash Carter, both of whom essentially consider Putin, not ISIS, as the true existential threat to America.

In the end, Kerry would have had to lay down the law: "Look guys, this is our last chance...if we don't get this deal tonight, the Syrian revolution will be exterminated...how many times do I have to repeat that we are NOT going to escalate a proxy war against the Kremlin?? We don't even have the Turks to help us do that anymore! I cannot offer Mr. Lavrov anything that the Russians will soon find out to be our duplicity or trickery...we cut off Al Nusra NOW and FOREVER, and live with the consequences of that...because the only alternatives are far worse...that is final!"

So will the latest Syrian ceasefire work? The answer probably rests on one thing and perhaps only one thing: Will Obama finally be able to rein in his deep-state apparatus?

Or perhaps Syria will actually work out in his last months in office, but that embittered apparatus will instead strike in Ukraine. The last thing anyone can expect is for it to take a humiliating blow lying down...someone, somewhere, must pay for this gut-wrenching Syrian fiasco in blood.