Dexter Filkins worries about Hezbollah intervening on Assad’s behalf:
[T]he most serious effects of Hezbollah’s stepped-up intervention in the Syrian war will be felt in Lebanon itself. Lebanon—which, like Syria, was created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the years after the First World War—had its own civil war, which lasted from 1975 until 1990. (That’s fifteen years.) Since then, the peace in Lebanon has depended on a delicate balance among the country’s main sects: the Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. To a great extent, this peace has depended on each group refraining from trying to grab too much power at the expense of the others. Over the past several years, Nasrallah has pushed this arrangement to the limit; Hezbollah is not just a political party but an army that is more powerful than the Lebanese state. Inside Lebanon, it its unassailable. Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria—essentially, a Shiite army crossing the border to kill Sunnis—represents a flagrant violation of Lebanon’s fragile sectarian pact.
Totten weighs in:
Washington has been understandably reluctant to get involved in the Syrian war, partly because the White House rightly fears such involvement could turn a local war into a regional war. But it looks like that just might happen regardless.
But that is not a reason to engage now. If we have not learned by now that regional wars in the Middle East are not invitations to a party, we never will.
(Photo: A Lebanese army soldier walks past graffiti on a closed shop which reads: ‘You shall fall Bashar..’ in Tripoli’s Sunni neighbourhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh, whose residents support the rebels battling to topple the regime in nearby Syria, during a truce with the Alawite district of Jabal Mohsen on May 27, 2013. Firefights in northern Lebanon between Sunni Muslims and Alawites — the Shiite offshoot sect to which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad belongs — killed 30 people last week, according to security sources. By Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 