Will Turkey Invade Syria? Can the West find a new calculus for the Syria dilemma?

Source: Lanids, Joshua. syriacomment.com/blog/. 10 April 2012.Noah Blaser of Zaman, the Turkish paper, suggested Turkey may be preparing to invade Syria. Reporters at his paper insist that Deputy Foreign Minister Naci Koru’s remarks that tomorrow “a new period will begin” in Turkey’s Syria policy is not more rhetorical bluster.Here is my response to his note, which is copied below.Landis: Turkish statesmen, no doubt, feel great pressure to take action in Syria. Who would not be outraged by the Syrian attack on refugees and Turkish workers within Turkey? The humanitarian crisis is appalling. Ankara doubtlessly sees the refugee problem on its border going from bad to worse. Syria is a mess. Neither restrained by Damascus nor discouraged from using the most inhuman methods to regain control of rebel towns, Syrian soldiers are acting with total impunity. All reluctance to barbarism has evaporated.All the same, I find it hard to imagine that Turkey will invade. Perhaps Turkey will up the ante in some way to hurt Syria in an effort to dissuade it from allowing its soldiers to act so disrespectfully.Something must be done. But Syria is a swamp. Its Kurdish region could secede to join Iraq. And the US does not want to get in the middle of a civil war. The Turkish government seems loath to take decisive action against Syria without firm US and European guarantees of partnership and commitment to clean up any mess afterward.I cannot see Turkish officials allowing their fit of peek to overtake their national interest. Turkey can only lose if it invades alone. In all probability, should Ankara invade, it would not be able to extract itself from Syria until the Syria regime was toppled, Alawite power destroyed, and a substitute government put in place. That is a very tall order.The problem with Syria is that if one regards it with nothing but cold calculation, Assad remains the lesser of possible evils, which could be chaos, lawlessness, or militia infighting. The opposition has shown no capacity for uited leadership. It cannot impose order on itself let alone bring order to Syria.The US, equally, can count few substantial benefits from intervention in Syria. Pundits claim that the present situation presents a once in a life time opportunity to hurt Iran, help Israel, and change the balance of power in the region. But, Iran is already hurt by Assad’s weakness. The Iranian economy is already weak and they government continues to throw good money after bad at Syria. Syria cannot harm its neighbors. It is a moral and military liability for Hizbullah. Hamas has decamped from Damascus already. The Assad regime as it stands today is a threat to no one save Syrians.Syria is a moral and humanitarian disaster. It begs for a humanitarian solution. But it is not a grave security threat. It will only become a security threat when the regime falls. There is nothing to take its place. I suspect regional statesmen are imagining all sorts of worst case scenarios should the regime fall: the spread of jihadism and al-Qaida, civil war, the possible break up of Syria, a rising death toll, and increased refugee outflows. Who can assure them that these nightmares would not become real?Assad has always insisted that without him Syria would fall apart and the region would face chaos or worse. He once threatened that should foreign powers intervene, Syria would be worse for them than a hundred Afghanistans. He is still making that calculation. It is possible that world leaders are too; although they running the numbers in the hope of finding a new calculus for the Syria dilemma.