"All this is happening in a region deeply destabilised by wars led by the US & by Israel ..."

Via AngryArab; 

"... After the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February 2005, and the hasty withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, Syria’s Ba’athist regime went through a period of isolation that Bashar al-Assad finally managed to end. By withstanding pressure from the US administration (which wanted to remove him), supporting Hizbullah during Israel’s war against Lebanon in 2006, and supporting Hamas in the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008-09, he bolstered his regime’s image as a centre of resistance. Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, impressed by his firm stance, even suspended their opposition, temporarily.The Ba’athist regime believed Syria’s position within the axis of resistance meant it was safe from the revolutionary movement that engulfed the region in 2011. But that was to reduce the conflict over Syria to its geopolitical dimension, as a confrontation between the imperialist and anti-imperialist camps, and to underestimate the changes brought about by the Arab revolutions and the aspirations of the Syrians. The regime miscalculated, because Syria has the same flaws as others in the region......
Syria’s opposition — or parts of it — are incapable of offering any serious guarantees for the future. Some of their earlier supporters have even turned away from the opposition. The Kurds, who were among the first to protest (to get national identity cards, which they had been denied), are now keeping their distance, shocked by the refusal of the Syrian National Council (SNC) to recognise their rights (4). The government has re-launched the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which it had already used in its military confrontations with Turkey in the 1990s and which remains popular among Syria’s Kurds.
There is a new split at the heart of the SNC, led by people such as Haytham al-Maleh and Kamal al-Labwani, former political prisoners who reject the SNC’s foreign alignment. Ammar Qurabi, the former head of Syria’s National Organisation for Human Rights and leader of the National Current for Change, has accused the SNC of marginalising Alawite and Turkmen activists (5). Syrian Christians, who have watched many Christians flee Iraq, are worried by the rise of the jihadists and the anti-Christian and anti-Alawite slogans chanted by protestors.
The SNC has many opponents, including the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which rejects foreign military intervention. It has gone through a series of internal splits, and is now dominated by the Islamists, though it is fronted by a few liberal figures. Its dependence on western countries and Gulf monarchies has gone down badly.
The result is total deadlock. The opposition cannot bring down the government, and the government cannot put down an uprising that has a surprising determination and courage. It would be impossible to return to the status quo ante....... There is a real risk of civil war, which could spill into Lebanon and Iraq. Foreign military intervention would intensify sectarian fighting and make the gun the only arbiter of religious divisions. It could destroy hopes of democracy in the region.... ....
The US hopes to knock down one of the pillars of the “axis of evil”, as well as Iran, which Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu would love to bomb. Having made an inglorious exit from Iraq, and soon to be driven out of Afghanistan where they are hated by the Taliban and a population exasperated by blunders, the Americans are reluctant to embark on a new military adventure in Syria, even though Assad’s fall would give them the chance to regain ground in the region. No one knows if they will support military intervention in the name of protecting civilians as they did in Libya. Would they risk destabilising a country to which jihadists and al-Qaida fighters are already flocking?
The former head of Mossad and ex-national security adviser Efraim Halevy has said that overthrowing the regime in Damascus would weaken Tehran, ending the need to bomb Iran (8). Could he have been expressing the position of the Israeli government? As Israel knows, making such a position public would only backfire on the Syrian opposition....
All this is happening in a region already deeply destabilised by wars led by the US (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and by Israel (in Lebanon and Palestine). These have led to weakened governments, to an increase in militias (in Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine and now Syria), often armed with powerful conventional weapons such as missiles, and to sectarian tensions that threaten minorities.....
Are we heading for an Islamist winter, sectarian clashes, or the crushing of the protest movements in Syria and Egypt? We cannot discount any of these hypotheses, but they all underestimate the power of the protests, the commitment to holding democratic elections and the extraordinary resilience of the people in Syria, as in Bahrain. They are reviving social and democratic struggles largely dormant since 1967, while maintaining their support for the Palestinian cause, which has never gone away. In this context, further foreign intervention would risk stirring up divisions, as it did in Iraq and Libya, and risk transforming a democratic struggle into a sectarian one, primarily between Shia and Sunnis."