'Turkey vs. Iran vs. the Saudis in battle for Syria!'

"... Turkey may have more leverage than all others with skin in the game. But Ankara is using its leverage cautiously. The truth is that Syria buys very little electricity from Turkey, and until now, Turkey hasn't halted most of the $2.5 billion a year in trade between the two countries. Perhaps the most dramatic Turkish shot across Assad's bows has been Ankara's hosting, not only of the opposition Syrian National Council, but also of the leadership of the insurgent Free Syrian Army. But at the same time, it has imposed limits on FSA activities on its soil.   "Turkey has never offered us even one bullet and has even completely banned operations on the border, or on the road to the border," the FSA's Turkey-based commander Ryad al-Asa'ad  told the BBC. "On the other hand, we are from inside Syria, we work inside Syria and the weapons are from Syria."
Turkey's increasingly apocalyptic language nonetheless suggests that Assad might turn back from the abyss.
To the extent that the positions of outside players determine Syria's outcome, it becomes yet another  theater of an increasingly complex regional power game.  The Arab monarchies have been rallied by the Saudis to mount an aggressive counter-revolutionary campaign, sensing U.S. paralysis in the face of the region-wide democratic rebellion. Riyadh has viewed events in the region through the prism of their (anti-Shi'ite) sectarian outlook and strategic rivalry with Iran, orchestrating the repression of the democratic protest movement in Shi'ite-majority Bahrain. But Assad is an Iranian ally, his regime dominated by the crypto-Shi'ite Allawite sect lording it over the Sunni majority. So the Arab counter-revolutionaries find themselves moving to the side of Syria's Sunni revolutionaries, although a Muslim Brotherhood victory there wouldn't necessarily be Riyadh's optimal outcome.
The U.S. and other Western powers have long loathed the Assad regime over its interventions in Lebanon, its support for Hamas and enabling of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. But they have also worked with it -- Syria fought alongside the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, and Syrian intelligence played an important role in hunting al-Qaeda after 9/11...But the U.S. no longer calls the shots in the region, even among those traditionally in its camp. The Saudis are doing their own thing, Qatar is flexing muscles nobody knew it had, and then there's Turkey, whose break with the U.S. on Iran and on Israel had many hawks in Washington proclaiming that Ankara had gone over to the dark side ...But America and Israel's loss was not Iran's gain: In the same week Turkey expelled Israel's ambassador, it also agreed to house a NATO radar system deployed to counter Iran's missile threat. Syria was the last straw, however, with Tehran making it clear it deemed action against Assad a "red line"...., Turkey simply ignored Tehran's objections and began piling on pressure.
Despite their common interest in tackling Assad, many of those Arab regimes don't much like the idea of Turkish influence spreading much more than they like the idea of Iranian influence spreading -- except that in this instance, Iran concurs!... should Syria maintain its current course, it could become a hard-power challenge to Turkey, and others, obliging them to adopt an end-game that could resolve the crisis without setting the region ablaze. At least on that score, they're all in agreement."