![]() Iran and Hezbollah know that the collapse of Assad’s regime could weaken, if not totally undermine, their hold on Lebanon. Lebanon is in fact a failed state in the sense that an organization, Hezbollah, is more powerful than the state and its army, and operates according to its own lights, and more accurately, according to Iran’s instructions. Lebanon, a country intimately connected to Syria, has been more deeply affected. Jordan, itself facing domestic political and economic difficulties, has been challenged by an inflow of close to half a million Syrian refugees, a number that threatens to destabilize the country. The three countries most deeply affected by the Syrian crisis are Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. It is against this backdrop that the growing danger of spillover and a larger regional war will now be examined. A peculiar combination of a growing sense of confidence and a lingering sense of despair have led it to take bolder action, be it additional use of chemical weapons in the face of international scrutiny or the willingness to risk Israeli intervention by transferring advanced weapon systems to Hezbollah. With the help offered by Iran and Hezbollah, and by using better tactics on the ground, it scored a number of military achievements. The regime now feels more confident in its ability to survive the crisis. The Obama administration also agreed with Russia to renew the effort to achieve a political-diplomatic solution to the crisis and to convene to this end a conference in Geneva. President Obama had drawn a red line of sorts with regard to the use of chemical weapons by the regime against the opposition, but when it transpired that the regime had indeed used such weapons, the U.S. The Obama administration, in turn, has made it abundantly clear that it does not wish to go beyond the diplomatic and indirect military support it has been giving to the opposition, and not to be drawn into military involvement in the crisis. Iran is now openly participating in the fighting in Syria, both directly and indirectly by bringing into the country thousands of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon. Russia, in addition to its ongoing diplomatic protection, has undertaken to supply Syria with the most advanced air defense systems, and additional sophisticated military equipment. Russia and Iran have dramatically increased their investment in supporting the regime, both having calculated that Assad’s fall would inflict an unacceptable blow to their positions in the Middle East or, conversely, an unacceptable gain to the United States and its regional allies. More recently, several developments converged to transform the nature of the crisis. This state of affairs lasted for almost two years, exacting a high price in casualties and destruction. The regime, in turn, could not defeat the opposition but was able to retain its control over Damascus and the central institutions of the state. ![]() Militarily, the conflict between the regime and the opposition could be described as a draw: The rebels took over large parts of the country but lacked the military capacity to defeat the regime. The Syrian civil war thus became a war-by-proxy between Iran and its rivals on the regional level and a new arena of Russian-American rivalry on the international one. The war did not remain a domestic Syrian affair external powers such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and to a lesser extent the United States and its West European allies began to support the opposition, while Russia, China, and Iran became the regime’s most important external supporters. After a relatively short period, a second phase began during which the crisis turned into a full fledged civil war. ![]()
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