Gideon Rachman identifies the divisions in the West over Syria:

To start with, there actually is no single “western” view on Syria. As the bitter debate on whether to lift the EU arms embargo reveals, European countries are deeply divided. France and Britain want to be able to supply weapons to the rebels. Germany remains very sceptical.

There are also divisions within countries. In the US, John Kerry, the new secretary of state, is an activist who wants to arm the rebels. President Barack Obama remains opposed. On both sides of the Atlantic, the intelligence and security establishments tend to take a more cautious line than the politicians and diplomats [bold mine-DL].

It is not surprising that there is less interest in meddling directly in Syria among those that will be expected to carry out the most dangerous parts of any policy of intervention. What is a little surprising is that their views appear to be prevailing for now. These internal divisions have been part of every debate over possible military action, but they are often papered over or minimized when there is a pro-intervention consensus among at least a few Western governments. The Pentagon didn’t want to fight a war in Libya, no matter how limited the U.S. role was, but its objections proved irrelevant once Obama changed his position. German opposition to the Libyan war didn’t matter to other Western governments, and instead it became an occasion to bemoan Germany’s supposed lack of vision. Franco-German opposition to the invasion of Iraq was angrily dismissed by the U.S. and Britain, and obviously it failed to dissuade them from invading. The truth is that “the West” has been deeply divided over foreign wars for the last decade, but those divisions are usually ignored by Washington when an administration is intent on military action. When an administration is ambivalent or opposed to military action, the disagreements among and within Western countries become harder to ignore.

Rachman continues:

There is a third reason for western inaction on Syria: Iran. Anxiety about its progress towards a nuclear bomb is rising once again. Some of those who argue that the US and its allies may ultimately have to attack Iranian nuclear facilities are warning against military involvement in Syria – which they argue would be the wrong conflict. “Syria would be a war of choice, but Iran would be a war of necessity,” says one western official [bold mine-DL].

If Rachman is right, this is not very encouraging, since it means that some significant part of the official opposition to intervention in Syria is based on a deranged view of Iran and its nuclear program that makes war with Iran more likely. A U.S.-led Syrian war would be folly, but the same is true for a U.S.-led attack on Iran. If the U.S. refrained from attacking Syria only so that it could attack Iran a little later, the region and the U.S. would both be much worse off. Neither war is necessary for the U.S., and both would be costly, unforced errors on our part. All preventive wars are “wars of choice,” and it’s absurd to call them anything else.