The road to peace in the Middle East generally begins in a luxury hotel somewhere safe and orderly. So it was that the first negotiations between all the countries involved in Syria’s civil war took place last week at the elegant Hotel Imperial in Vienna, which, as it happens, once employed Hitler in its kitchens.There were no Syrians at the Vienna conference for the simple reason that assembling Bashar al-Assad’s bloodsoaked regime and all his rebel opponents around the same table remains impossible. But, for the first time, the foreign ministers of the 17 nations with a role in Syria’s tragedy sat down together. Most remarkably, this gathering included Iran, along with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. At the outset of Syria’s war, America, Britain and France all