Steven Cook marvels at how little loose talk of starting a war with Syria there is:

The most stunning thing about how American foreign policy experts and elites talk about Syria today is the one aspect of the country’s crisis that they won’t discuss. There is little to no actual debate about direct international intervention into an uprising and crackdown that has cost more than 5,000 Syrian lives.

Considering how readily and easily many of the same people float the idea of attacking Iran, Cook has a point, but I’m not sure that this is a problem that needs to be solved. If there is no discussion of military intervention in Syria, that suggests that Western governments recognize that there are limits to what they can do, and they also see that there is nowhere near the same degree of international support and/or toleration for a Syrian war. Russia has made it clear that there will be no U.N. authorization for intervention in Syria, and that would make it impossible for intervening governments to claim that they are acting legally. Cook dismisses the need for U.N. authorization, which puts him in the position of proposing a war that would be illegal under international law.

One of the main arguments Cook makes is that Western governments are not contemplating intervention because they assume that Assad will lose power anyway, but it seems to me that Assad’s possible staying power would be yet another argument against intervention. If Assad is not going to be forced out by internal opposition, that could indicate that there is not as much of a popular groundswell in favor of regime change as many outside the country might think. Syria’s international isolation is not as great as Libya’s was, and until it becomes so it is difficult to imagine Syria receiving the same treatment.

If Libya is not yet like post-invasion Iraq, Syria shares more similarities with Iraq than Libya did (as Cook acknowledges near the end of his article). It is an ethnically and religiously diverse country ruled by a Baathist dictatorship, and there is the danger that intervention could trigger political fragmentation, civil war, and sectarian violence. The worst of the violence in Iraq came years after the initial invasion, and in the event of regime collapse in Syria there is reason to fear that the country would suffer the same breakdown in security and order that Iraq did.

At the very least, an extensive air campaign in Syria would likely lead to the displacement of large numbers of people, as the 2006 war in Lebanon did, and it would probably force the nearly one million Iraqi refugees still living there to flee. Foreign military intervention would intensify and escalate the violence in Syria. As Marc Lynch wrote earlier this week:

Military intervention in Syria has little prospect of success, a high risk of disastrous failure, and a near-certainty of escalation which should make the experience of Iraq weigh extremely heavily on anyone contemplating such an intervention. There is no magic number of deaths at which the U.S. must embark on a self-defeating and foolish adventure.