Assad has already decided that he will die in Syria. Unlike Gaddafi in Lybia, Assad has behind him the power of a religion, of the Alawite sect. Assad is not a man, he's a religious movement, and religious movements cannot be readily destroyed by force, in fact the very act of persecution often emboldens them.
The Alawites have their very own Samson Option, and that option involves Israel. In the past, Assad promised to use chemical weapons only against foreigners. That was not an idle threat, and Assad has spent two years planning a last ditch attempt at survival. Should the United States lead a kinetic coalition against Assad, then he will clearly see Gaddafi in the mirror.
Though one would presume that the rational thing to do when attacked by one individual is to not start attacks against another, thereby inviting more enemies, this logic does not apply to Israel. However, if Assad manages to successfully invite Israel into the fight, then he will have won the support of Iran even more. Assad needs to gas an Israeli center or two, his survival depends on bringing Israel into the fight. If I were Assad and knew that the US and the UK were bombing my country, I would gas an Israeli center; it's the intelligent thing for a psychopath to do. Assad has already successfully convinced many of his followers that it is his enemies using chemical weapons in order to discredit him.
Assad using chemical weapons recently, and just as UN inspectors arrived, was a calculated act to sow distrust in allegations that he would be so "stupid" as to use chemical weapons just as inspectors arrived, and his followers will not believe it. When Israel finds itself gassed, the Alawites will believe a conspiracy against their religion, and if they notice the Star of David in their land, then the world will plunge into a conflict that will bring about the death of millions.
Half a million Americans died during the Civil War; only 100,000 Syrians have died. Our history should teach us that interference in internal struggles can only bring about more doom than it will solve. Our interference will only hasten a bigger war, one that will destroy the US economy.
Let's recall 2003, and the daily press briefings of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, better known as Comical Ali, or Baghdad Bob. Comical Ali predicted: "They are trying to say that the Iraqi is easy to capture, in order to deceive the world that it is a picnic. One day, they [will] start facing bitter facts... The simple fact is this: they are foreigners inside a country which has rejected them. Therefore, these foreigners, wherever they go or travel, they will be rained down with bullets from everyone. Attacks by members of the resistance will only go up... The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad."
The Atlantic summed up Bob's prediction about the suicide rate perfectly: "In 2003, this was probably Sahhaf's most quoted line. It was so conveniently ludicrous, so patently untrue, that commentators didn't have to do any research or devote any column inches to disproving it. A decade later, nobody jokes about military suicide. The Department of Veteran Affairs recently published the most comprehensive study of veteran suicides ever conducted, revealing that about 22 American vets committed suicide every day in 2010, the most recent year for which data was available. That's up from 18 per day in 2008. So Sahhaf was actually slightly wrong on this one. The United States really loses their servicemen and women to suicide not by the hundreds, but by the thousands. And not at the gates of Baghdad, but at home."
And yes, we plunder in foreign lands, but eventually the war comes home. This war promises to bring about not hundred, not thousands, but millions of Israeli and American lives. The political world as we know it is coming to an end.
