The most amusing part of The Washington Post‘s editorial on NATO and Syria has to be the title: “NATO’s inexplicable reluctance to aid Syria.” This isn’t inexplicable. Nothing could be easier to explain than this “reluctance.” NATO is supposedly a defensive alliance that has been exhausted by its “out-of-area” wars over the last several years. That includes the war in Libya last year that exposed the limitations of non-U.S. NATO members and the alliance’s ongoing over-reliance on U.S. forces. Syria may border on a NATO country, but the government of that country still seems uninterested in becoming directly involved in Syria’s conflict, and no other NATO members have any interest in greater involvement. It would make more sense to refer to interventionists’ inexplicable eagerness to interfere in Syria.
There is no political will for NATO involvement in Syria, the military resources of non-U.S. members have already been stretched by the Libyan war, and the aftermath of the Libyan war ought to make interventionists everywhere more cautious. The Libya “victory” may ring hollow, but it isn’t because it didn’t serve as a springboard for another war. NATO has no business taking sides in another country’s civil war anyway, and the alliance isn’t looking for a new war. NATO’s refusal so far to listen to interventionist arguments on Syria is one of the small pieces of good news coming from the summit.
cfountain72 
After our victory in Libya, in helping the rebels depose Muammar Qaddafi as the long-time dictator of Libya, the aftermath set in. The NTC government only has control of Tripoli, there’s a lot of scapegoating of black migrant workers in Libya by nationalistic Arabs. Blacks and Sufis are scapegoated by members of the rebellion for their perceived loyalties to the old Qaddafi regime.
To make matters (possibly) worse, there’s word Eastern Libya threatens to succeed from the NTC Libya. Ironically, that is where the anti-Qaddafi rebellion started last year. (Although I can’t fully vouch for it’s authenticity, since I hear different messages from different sources…including full autonomy from the Kremlin’s Fox New – Russia Today and Semi-Autonomy from CNN)
The question becomes not so much whether or not the removal of Qaddafi was a good or bad thing, but where does Libya go from here?
Syria is an even trickier puzzle yet. Assad’s government has the upper-hand over the rebels now because of Kofi Annan’s folly. Turkey’s “Zero-Problems with Neighbors” foreign policy is starting to go out the door because of both Assad’s belligerence towards Turkey and Turkey’s pro-NATO stance. Also, many in the US who are watching hate Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, but at the same time, they are reluctant to back the opposition because of Al-Qaeda connections. Iran backs the Assad government while the Arab league, including Saudi Arabia backs the rebellion.