Three Takes on Syria and its Regional Repercussions

The recent snows made a bad situation so much worse for the roughly one-third of Syrians who are now refugees that I find it hard to bring myself to write about it, so I'll let some people who know the country better than I do, anyway, pick up the slack:

• Marc Lynch and POMEPS on "The Political Science of Syria's War."  Lynch on the project here;  POMEPS main page here; a .pdf of the multiple papers in the project published as a POMEPS Brief here.

• Joshua Landis has a guest post on Elias Muhanna's Qifa Nabki blog: "The Great Sorting Out: Ethnicity and the Future of the Levant," Elias has some rebuttal, and both comments grew out of an earlier post around a PBS discussion by Josh and Murhaf Jouejati on "Syria and the Lessons of Iraq." And if you're at all interested in Syria and/or Lebanon you need to be reading Josh Landuis' Syria Comment and Elias' Qifa Nabki regularly, anyway.

• Finally take a look at Jeffrey White, a military analyst at WINEP, on "The Syrian Regime's Military Solution to the War." As grim and depressing as it sounds from an ex-DIA analyst who used to think the rebels had the upper hand.