Many more wars have resulted from miscalculation than deliberate
planning, and mounting blunders in recent weeks have significantly
raised the likelihood that violence in Syria will continue to escalate,
drawing the United States and its allies ever closer to direct
involvement in another bloody conflict. The crisis is already careening
toward the one red-line that could make direct outside intervention all
but inevitable: an all-out civil war that ignites in the heart of the
Middle East, and threatens to spread along the region’s already
smoldering ethnic and sectarian divides.
“What gets lost in all
the talk of Syria being like Libya is that it’s located at the very
epicenter of inter-Arab and Arab-Israeli politics,” said Aram
Nerguizian, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington. Already, the Syrian crisis has prompted regional
actors to take sides in what could easily shape up as a proxy war, he
noted, with majority Sunni states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the
Persian Gulf states lining up behind the mostly Sunni Syrian opposition,
and Shiite majority Iran and Iraq backing the regime of Syrian
strongman Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Alawite sect of Shiite
Islam.
