You can relax, Syria is going to remain the hellish proxy war it's always been.
These type of "intervention" follows a pattern.
1. First we instigate an uprising by exploiting existing tensions or creating one.
2. Then when the local govt reacts like we expected them to, we cry foul, and say we have to defend helpless civilians from a "brutal and authoritarian" regime.
3. We warn members of that regime's police and military that they'll be guilty of war crimes if they act against the "rebels". This is when you come to see the role the International Criminal Court plays in our efforts at global domination. Key members of the govt military will start getting phone calls to defect. And many will defect.
4. At this point all you'll read in the western press about the local govt are just how bad the regime is. Propaganda all the way.
5. If things are not going according to plan, we rush to the UN for permission to establish a "no fly zone" in the country. We'll get our wish, of course. And that's when cruise missiles start taking our the military infrastructure of the local govt. Dams and other civilian infrastructure are fair game too. Everything goes down hill from there.
That was how it played out in Libya. Syria was close to 5 when Russian stepped in. Assad owes Putin big!
While this is going on, we in the west (the rest of us not involved in the war effort) are busy with our lives. We don't bother if it's our govt doing it to others.
And the beat goes on. Until something happens. But it happened because "they hate our freedom".
But the gods are not to blame.
Far more importantly though, we're the prime architects of how life in the Middle East has proceeded for decades now. We shouldn't make the mistake of intervening in their civil war, but we should take a long hard look at ourselves and plan for the blowback.
This isn't quite true.
Iran goaded the US into invading Iraq, perhaps supplying the fake evidence used to link Saddam Hussein to WMDs. This was at least Hussein's opinion, and why he did not take US threats immediately leading up to the war seriously. Saddam's successor, Chalabi, was an Iranian agent [[1].
Bashar Al-Assad aggressively sponsored terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq. In the early days, most fighters from Iraq were from Syria, or came through Syria. It was not without irony that the conflict later spilled over into his country.
The leaders of the Middle East are not without fault, they clumsily used the West's domestic insecurities (and Russia's) for their own military gain. In Syria they unleashed forces they could no longer control.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/middleeast/26iht-m26...
I'm really afraid at how easily it has become to find any pretext to bomb and destroy any country by the US. All of course in the name of "democracy and freedom". It's a pity that whole generations of people living in destroyed countries are either dead or have no democracy and freedom at all.
And as it was reported here several weeks ago, sometimes pretext is not even necessary. Just send a bomb or rocket any time - it's a thirld world country, no one care about people living in those countries.
The Iraqi Kurds generally seem pretty happy about not being murdered anymore.
(Just saying there's two sides to every story. Giving peace a chance only works if the other party is willing to as well - sometimes they just take the opportunity to invade Poland)
In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that they believed Chalabi to be an Iranian agent.[8]
I think this world is upside down.