The deluge of killing in Libya having subsided (but only for now), storm clouds are now gathering over the ancient Arab capital of Damascus.
Syria is on the verge of all-out civil war and we're on the verge of being dragged into it by our leaders. Like the Libyan rebels before them the Syrian opposition has moved decisively to demand from the "international community" our old friend the "No Fly Zone".
This was the trail which led us ineluctably into the war with Iraq and then with Libya and may qualify for an Orwell Prize for "Doublespeak" one day. It means anything but "no-flying" of course, indeed quite the opposite. It means lots of flying, and bombing, by us of the people down below.
Perhaps twenty times as many civillians died in Libya than had done so before we began (and many more will perish in the conflagrations which lie ahead). The steady toll of attrition on both sides in the conflict in Syria may well be about to explode like the mother of all fragmentation bombs and there's no telling who the razor-sharp sheets of boiling metal and shards of flying glass of another Imperial war in the middle east will slice.
The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad are no boy scouts to be sure as the bloody repression there now shows. Like any regime - including our own - they will fight to the death to avoid their own revolutionary overthrow.
But Assad is not Gadaffi and Syria is not Libya. Assad has significant support where Gadaffi had less. This support is strongest amongst the ethnic and religious minorities in Syria, a patchwork quilt of Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze, Kurdish and Christian parts. The wealthiest Sunnis - who have profited mightily from the iron-heel imposed stability of Assad family rule - are with the regime, fearing the chaos which might follow it. The minorities know all too well from Lebanon next door what confessional civil war looks like.
Gadaffi was without allies, Syria is not. Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon will stand with Bashar in any foreign intervention. So will their patrons in Iran. Shiite dominated Iraq will too. And Arab nationalists, not what they were but not extinct, will regroup under the banner of defending Damascus, heartland of the Arab idea, from another Crusader expedition.
Russia and China will never agree to a United Nations resolution to authorise western bombardment of Syria and have already used their veto once in this regard. But as the Iraq War showed, UN cover while a useful fig-leaf when it can be procured, is not neccessary to hide the un-embarrassable when they are as tumescent as this.
On the other side we will have Israel, whose policy has long been to break up their neighbours' countries into their religious and ethnic building blocks, Saudi Arabia and other reactionary Arab kingdoms desperately seeking to regain the initiative in the Arab spring, Nato hawks the brutal sodomising and murder of Gadaffi pulsing like Viagra in their veins, and Turkey, a Nato member, which is already preparing Benghazi-like "sanctuaries" on which the Syrian opposition can base the war they will wage under Nato air-cover.
A cloud no bigger than a man's hand can be the harbinger of great storms to come. So remember that you first read this weather report here...
