I was troubled to see Israel has revised its now obviously wrong prediction on how long Assad will cling to power [they originally unknown to me apparently predicted he had but a few months] - I'm troubled because I always look first to Israel for the to the bone story on what's actually happening in that screwed up part of the world - I'm troubled because all the other 'sources' I read for this kind of info insisted confidently that, just as with Libya, the superficial Western media was getting the Syrian question quite wrong, that Assad would be going nowhere, that the Alawite regime would be going nowhere [at least not without putting up one hell of a fight] and that the aggrieved Sunni opposition was an incoherent mess of squabbling Islamist factions who should be feared more than championed - which is exactly why the large non-Sunni minority in Syria was unlikely to turn on Assad, fear of a retributional blood bath that might follow in the wake.
So it troubles me Israel got this one wrong - if you can't trust them to have a grasp on what the hell's goin' on over there, then who do you trust? - although, not impossible they were trying to feed the perception of a weak Assad in hopes of spurring an outside intervention, not just from the US but Turkey maybe, the Saudis, who are already definitely involved - but I dunno, of course one can see a strategic gain for israel if Assad goes bye bye seeing as how he's an Iran client - but, so many bad things could happen here - to me I always thought for Israel it was a Mubarak-like 'better the devil you know' type scenario when it came to Assad - maybe not. I mean, if the Alawite regime starts to crumble or the Sunni insurgents evolve into a more credible force then the situation almost certainly degrades into a full blown civil war and no doubt a very violent one - that to my mind almost certainly then draws Iraq and Lebanon into a sectarian upheaval, and then probably Iran and Turkey - and then, who knows, maybe even Russia. The chance of this, should the insurgency start to make real progress, escalating into a gigantic shit storm is bracingly real.
Given that, you see how it troubles me that Israel got this wrong - you do have to ask yourself if maybe they see a wider Sunni/Shia conflagration brewing here and figure somehow this could work to their advantage. I dunno. Could be they just got it wrong.
