The Gathering Storm in Syria

[piercehawkeye45]

Hopefully this will not happen...but the pieces are being set for a greater Middle Eastern War.

...

Two days earlier, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah defiantly confirmed his men were in Syria fighting for Assad. “We will be the ones to bring victory,” he declared. Syrian opposition leaders believe about 7,000 Hezbollah fighters are in the country.

In the meantime, the situation in Syria threatens to escalate, not just drawing in its neighbours, but also unpicking the basic structure of the Middle East from the Levant to the Gulf — a structure largely unchanged since 1916.

Michael Clarke, director- general of the Royal United Services Institute, fears the region is splitting into two camps: on one side, Hezbollah, the Alawites, the Shi’ite minority in Syria, the Shi’ite majority in Iraq backed by Iran — and on the other, Jordan, the Christian and Sunni peoples of Lebanon, the Sunni majority in Syria and the Sunni minority in Iraq backed by Saudi Arabia.

“Syria is the eye of a much wider storm about to break out across the region,” he warns. “If Syrian sectarianism creates this sort of ethnic/religious fault line across the whole region then a lot of existing national boundaries will come to mean very little.”

...

The UN said yesterday that more than 1,000 people were killed in Iraq in May, the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-7, stoking fears of a return to civil war.

...

Israel, watching the arc of previously stable dictatorships around most of its borders crumble, has already shown itself willing to take military action in Syria and Lebanon.

The Jewish state has made clear it will act in its own interests, even if those might not coincide with those of America or Britain.

There are many different players in this conflict, each with their own set of interests. As I said, hopefully it does not escalate from here but things do not look optimistic.

As for U.S. involvement, it seems to be damned if we do...damned if we don't.

“We can identify who these people are,” said McCain. “We can help the right people.”

That could be easier said than done. Reports from Lebanon indicated that two of the men posing beside him might have been leaders of a brigade responsible for kidnapping 11 Shi’ite pilgrims.

...

No military plan, however, looks attractive. “The problem with arming the rebels is we only like 25% of them and even if you give them stuff there’s no guarantee it won’t be passed on to Islamists,” said one western diplomat in Washington.

....

As the conflict escalates and spreads, Vali Nasr, a former State Department official under Obama, points out the costs of inaction could be colossal.

“If al-Qaeda takes control of parts of Syria, how are we going to deal with that? If you don’t invest in training a militia that you have control of, that you can ultimately unleash against al-Qaeda, then you have to deal with it on your own.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art..._118699-3.html