The Obama administration now wants Congress to approve a military strike against Syria in retaliation for its use of chemical weapons. Why is the administration so bent on intervention? Isn’t it violating international law? What will be the likely impact of an attack? Will it plunge the United States into another war in the Middle East? Or will it have no effect whatsoever on the carnage? Should the U.S. go further and ensure a rebel victory by crippling Bashar al Assad’s regime? Or should it stand back and watch the two sides destroy each other and the county?

What is happening in Syria's civil war?

In March 2011, Syrians, inspired by the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, took to the streets in Damascus and Daraa to demand political reforms. As the demonstrations continued and grew, the government of Bashar al Assad responded with guns and tanks. By July, Assad’s forces had killed some 3,000 demonstrators, and what had begun as a movement for reform became an armed revolt aimed at toppling Assad. The Free Syrian Army was led by defectors from the Syrian Army and was backed by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But even as defections from the Assad regime mounted, the rebels were not able to win a quick victory over Assad, who could rely on an army drawn from his own minority Alawite community, which makes up about 15 percent of Syria, and on support from Iran, Russia, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

As the battle stalemated, foreign Islamists, many of them loyal to al Qaeda, began to pour into Syria late last year to join the battle against Assad. By this Spring, they constituted a more effective fighting force than the Free Syrian Army. Politically, the opposition became splintered into a largely dysfunctional Syrian National Coalition, which compromised the more moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army, and hundreds of Islamist groups, who lack any unified leadership or common objectives, but who have a base among Syria’s Sunnis, who make up 60 percent of the population.

To some extent, the war has degenerated into what Brookings political scientist Kenneth Pollack calls an “intercommunal conflict” pitting Assad’s Alawite minority, which enjoys the support of the Kurds and other minority groups, against Syria’s Sunni majority. The two sides control roughly equal parts of the country. Assad enjoys an advantage from his air force and more trained military and the rebels from their larger population base. Assad, who has shown a willingness to destroy his own country in order to maintain power, represents the greater evil, but from the standpoint of the United States, the rebels are by no means a viable or desirable alternative.

Why is the United States considering intervention?

In February 2010, the Obama administration signaled a thaw in U.S.-Syrian relations by nominating Richard Ford to be the first ambassador to Syria. The Bush administration had withdrawn the United States ambassador in 2005. But as the Syrian regime stepped up its violent repression of demonstrators in mid-2011, Obama backed sanctions on Syria and in August 2011 called for Assad to step down. Yet, as conflict became a civil war, Obama, fearful of being drawn into another Middle Eastern war, refused weapons and extended only the most limited military training to the Free Syrian Army. In June 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared, "We made a decision not to provide lethal assistance at this point … If we don't get this done in a responsible way, there's a real danger that the situation there could deteriorate into a terrible civil war." Of course, the conflict did deteriorate into a terrible war—one in which the United States then became reluctant to arm a rebel force increasingly dominated by Islamist factions.