The rebel ranks hold lots of foreign fighters, and Hezbollah is lined up with Assad. It's an ever-widening proxy war sinkhole emerging in the Middle East, and about 70,000 people have fallen into so far.

This is a re-alignment of power and that means mass graves. It was always going to mean that.

As for your 70,000...is that just the current dead? How about the half million freezing refugees in camps in Turkey and Jordan? Turkey is thinking about its western treaties. What does that mean for displaced Syrians? Arab Spring is beginning to destabilize Jordan. What does that mean to the Syrian refugees and the much earlier Palestinian ones?

And it just occurred to me to wonder how many Syrian refugees are Iraqis who fled our kindly interference in their lives?

Dictatorships have no provision for an orderly transfer of power. THIS WAS ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN.

So far China looks like the big winner but it's early days. Turkey is also licking its chops. We were fools to barge into Iraq. We were at least ten years too early and uninvited. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld make idiots look like Einstein.

They will work for any dictator who still has access to his Swiss accounts. Ask Iran.

The non-state actors, whether Hezbollah or Nusra, all are bankrolled - quite well, in fact.

But there are nonetheless true believers in the ranks of each.

I think that the bloody Sunni supremacism exacting a toll from Aleppo to Baghdad, will sooner or later not just tactically but strategically align the interests of Israeli Jewry and the masses of Shia Muslims. I hope that this occurs, as a force for security and peace for Israel, and religious pluralism in Arab countries. Just an aside...

That would be strange bedfellows indeed.

I know that Alawites are not Shiites, but there is a historical basis for mutual understanding between Syrian Alawites and the Zionist movement.

In a letter to the French Prime Minister, Bashar Assad's grandfather clearly proclaimed that "the Alawite nation refuses to be annexed to Muslim Syria, because the Islamic religion is thought of as the official religion of the country, and the Alawite nation is thought of as heretical by the Islamic religion."

He also stated that "those good Jews, who have brought to the Muslim Arabs civilization and peace, and have spread wealth and prosperity to the land of Palestine, have not hurt anyone and have not taken anything by force, and nevertheless the Muslims have declared holy war against them and have not hesitated to slaughter their children and their women despite the fact that England is in Palestine and France is in Syria."

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/analysis/dr-mordechai-kedar/assads-grandfathers-1936-letter-predicts-muslim-slaughter-of-minorities-praises-zionists/2012/09/20/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=assads-grandfathers-1936-letter-predicts-muslim

Sunni supremacism - I speculate - will rework the Middle East. Iran, the "pro-democracy" movement in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the Iraqi leadership, Hezbollah, and the Syrian state leadership, all - whether they like it or not - are on the same side of the barricades in a defensive fight with Bin Laden type terrorists, teacher killers, church bombers... Ultimately, this places them in the same camp, on some level, with another force in Middle East that is opposed to that feudal mob - Israel.