Carpenter identifies several "sides" or protagonists: the radical Sunni Islamists, the Shiite alliance, the traditional Sunni powers, the Kurds, and Israel. He indicates how unified each is and what their goals might be.
His conclusion isn't bad:
Given the disparate motives of the various parties, it is unwise for U.S. officials to view the fight against ISIS as a stark conflict between good and evil. Instead, it is a complex, multisided, regional power struggle in which murky alliances and questionable, if not sleazy, objectives are the norm.Instead, it is a conflict between varying degrees of evil. To invert an old German's comment about beer, "there are no good people in the Middle East, some are worse than others."
