Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of the Republic of Turkey, may at present be the most dangerous man on our planet. Renowned as a brilliant politician domestically, who skillfully manipulates Turkish public opinion for electoral gains, he has also established a reputation for shooting from the mouth without much forethought when it comes to foreign affairs. On November 24, 2015 Erdogan went beyond words, authorizing his air force to take down a Russian fighter jet.

While some of the facts regarding the shootdown of the Russian Air Force SU-24 remain in contention between Turkey and Russia, what has emerged  is deeply disturbing. Even Turkey admits that the Russian aircraft was in its airspace for a mere seventeen seconds.  American authorities have informed various news agencies that the SU-24 was  in Turkish skies for only a few seconds, and was actually flying over Syria when it was destroyed by a missile fired by a Turkish fighter. These facts would seem to confirm the allegation made by Russian President Vladimir Putin that the shootdown of the SU-24 was premeditated. In other words, President Erdogan had apparently ordered his country’s air force to destroy a Russian military aircraft as soon as a pretext emerged. An overflight that may have occurred over Turkish air space for a few seconds provided that pretext.

If Erdogan sought to destroy a Russian aircraft, for what purpose would he have engaged in such a dangerously brazen escalation of the already explosive reality that is the failed and disintegrating state of Syria?

The Turkish president maintains that Russia’s claim that it is fighting ISIS is a canard, and that Moscow is primarily targeting the “moderate” opposition to Assad, which Turkey supports. Until the bombing of a Russian airliner over Sinai, that was certainly true. However, after the Metrojet plane was destroyed over the Sinai desert, Russia began shifting its bombing campaign towards the Islamic State. Furthermore, Turkey has been playing the same game, under Erdogan’s instructions. Also claiming to be fighting ISIS in Syria, the Turkish Air Force has actually conducted far fewer  air strikes on the Islamic State than Moscow’s air force. Instead, Turkish aircraft have primarily targeted the Kurdish militias in Syria, the same force that has been the most effective opposition to ISIS in northern Syria. Erdogan is much more interested in preventing the Kurds from achieving any form of sovereignty in the Middle East than in confronting the Islamic State.

The most likely explanation for Erdogan’s astonishing decision to launch an attack on a Russian aircraft was to thwart and strangle at birth the nascent indications of a possible grand coalition being formed to combat ISIS, involving the United States, France and Russia. After the terrorist attacks in Paris and the destruction of the Russian airliner in Egypt, French President Hollande saw a rare opportunity to bring together those three countries in facing a common danger. It must be noted that the Turks downed the Russian warplane on the same day Hollande was in Washington, meeting with President Obama prior to a follow-up meeting with Putin. The shootdown of the SU-24 probably has doomed President Hollande’s vision of a grand alliance working together in fighting the Islamic State.

Irrespective of Erdogan’s immediate objective, his reckless decision has perhaps put the entire planet on the path towards an unintended but potentially devastating war. President Putin will be forced to act  in some form, not only due to his own personal feelings. No matter how cool-headed and cautiously he may intend  to respond to the Turkish attack, he is not immune to Russian public opinion. Not only the shootdown, but the barbaric murder of one of the parachuting Russian pilots by Turkey’s allies in Syria–an act that is in clear violation of the Geneva Convention–will inevitably stimulate great indignation among the Russian people.

In 1914 renegade elements in a foreign intelligence service orchestrated the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo. In the weeks that followed, miscalculations intersected with a system of military alliances that put the world on the path to world war. Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Erdogan has already called on NATO for full support in the face of possible future Russian military countermeasures in response  to the destruction of the SU-24. Alarmingly, President Obama has already expressed public support for Turkey’s right to defend its airspace.

Before Turkey’s recklessly irresponsible leader drags the United States into an unintended military confrontation with Russia over events in Syria, President Obama should reconsider his blanket support for Turkey’s belligerent and brazen acts of violence against Moscow, and make clear that the United States–and NATO–will not be dragged into a conflict with Moscow over Erdogan’s dangerous adventurism.

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Do you recall how the Obama administration refused to support mainstream opponents to the Assad regime in Syria for years, until Islamist extremists came to dominate the forces fighting against the Syrian president? President Obama then said he would counter ISIS influence in Syria with a half billion dollar training program for “moderate” Syrian opponents of Assad. Ever wonder what happened with Washington’s major investment in moderate Syrian fighters? Wonder no more.

In stunning testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Pentagon officials informed shocked senators that the $500 million investment from the coffers of American taxpayers led to “4 or 5” Syrian fighters being trained and deployed in the fight against ISIS. And they are uncertain if the number was either four or five? The answer is fiscally important, for in a best case scenario America spent a mere one hundred million dollars per moderate freedom-fighter; worst case, the tab rises to $125 million per fighter.

The statement on the paltry results achieved from such a major investment by the Obama administration drew gasps of horror and stunned laughter from the senators. This is more than a failure of President Obama’s Syria policy; it is a manifestation of total incapacity to manage and steward the funds provided to the government by the nation’s taxpayers. But don’t expect any resignations over this dismal “return on investment.” As shocking as this episode is, many American citizens will not be surprised. In fact, the training program for moderate Syrian fighters can serve as a metaphor for so many fiscal aberrations that far too often are the rule rather than the exception when it comes to the fiscal probity of the federal government.

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A mythology surrounds the man who has been President or Prime Minister of the Russian Federation for the past sixteen years, particularly among a clique of sycophants in Western Europe and the United States. This Putin myth, embellished by the Kremlin’s international television propaganda arm “Russia Today,” has convinced some that Mr. Putin is much smarter and more thoughtful in his long-term thinking than his peers in the West. My question to those who still believe in the Putin myth of infallibility is this: why did the Russian president recently decide on sending his armed forces to Syria to participate in that sad country’s interminable and ever more bloody civil war?

Not even the Russian president bothers to deny that Russia is establishing a forward operating base adjacent to the Syrian port of Latakia. The evidence is so overwhelming in an age of Internet access to satellite photography, why refute the obvious? Putin does offer a rationalization of sorts; the Kremlin, so says the Russian president, has decided to join the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS. In reality, with Russia’s Syrian ally (and Iran’s puppet) Basher al-Assad on the ropes , President Putin has made a strategic decision to join with the Iranian Shiite theocracy and its Hezbollah proxy to continue to wage war on Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, primarily to save a long-time client from total collapse.

If Putin is as smart and savvy as his fans in the West maintain, why has he not learned from America’s failed overseas intervention in Iraq, not to mention Vietnam? Then there is the example closer to home, the Russian geopolitical disaster of a quarter of a century ago; the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. If an army of 150,000 soldiers backed by massive airpower could not defeat the Islamist fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan, what calculus leads the Kremlin to believe that the much weaker Russia of today can have anything but a temporary and localized impact on the horrendous Syrian Civil War?

It appears that prestige, and a desire not to lose Russia’s version of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba–the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria– are the basis of the deployment of Russian military assets to Latakia. Whatever the short-term benefits are for Assad and his Alawite minority regime, the long-term impact for Russia will be brutally punishing. The appalling Russian experience in Afghanistan should have informed Russia’s decision makers of the dangerous path they have embarked upon.

When Iran deployed its Hezbollah militia, paid mercenaries and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria in the earlier stages of the Syrian Civil War, there were predictions outside the Middle East that this marked an irredeemable turn in the tide of battle in favor of Assad. A much more knowledgeable observer, the Beirut-based Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri, warned that Iran’s intervention in the Syrian Civil war would only inflame sectarian passions, leading to a regional Sunni-Shiite conflict. That predication had been vindicated in all its horror. Now Putin is doubling-down on the hell that he and his Iranian ally have contributed towards creating. Russia, which today has only a fraction of the military capability of the former Soviet Union, cannot achieve victory for Assad. However, as with Iran’s intervention in Syria, Vladimir Putin will succeed in galvanizing hatred towards his nation, unleashing a jihad against the Kremlin that will not only involve evermore fighters from the Sunni Arab world joining in a holy war against Russia’s invasion of the Arab world. In all probability, the festering discontent within Russia’s own borders among a disaffected and increasingly militant Muslim minority in regions such as Chechnya will be exacerbated. In the early years of Putin’s rule, Russia was subjected to a wave of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Russian civilians, all attributed to unrest in Chechnya. That is but a harbinger of what will come, a predictable bloodbath on Russia’s own soil as blowback for Mr. Putin’s ill-fated attempt to show he can militarily intervene in the Muslim world without incurring the consequences his Soviet-era predecessors experienced over Afghanistan.

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Amid the flurry of Obama administration official statements promulgated by its various presidential and departmental spokespersons, reality is setting in. Despite the happy talk from Washington about ISIL (the Obama administration’s preferred acronym for describing the Islamic State), military facts on the ground cannot be eradicated by press briefings and political spin.  The recent and significant victories by the armies of the Islamic State in Palmyra, Syria and Ramadi, Iraq are a clear testament to the undiminished military efficacy and capability of the nascent caliphate.

Last  October I penned a piece in the Huffington Post, “President Obama Wages War on the Islamic State: Anatomy of a Disaster in the Making” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-filger/president-obama-wages-war_b_5933642.html), in which I predicted failure for President Obama in his role of Commander-in-Chief in the evolving military confrontation with the Islamic State and its appointed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. I specifically highlighted four areas I saw as flaws in the President’s approach towards the struggle with the caliphate: 1. Propensity to underestimate the enemy and his capabilities; 2.Overreliance on insufficient means, primarily airpower; 3.Lack of a grand strategic vision, essential for prevailing in the conflict; 4. Intellectually myopic in recognizing the full dimensions of the threat posed to America by the Islamic State.

Regrettably, all the deficiencies I outlined seven months ago remain intact, as evidenced by the recent strategic victories gained by the Islamic State’s military forces in Syria and Iraq. It should be pointed out that the distance between Palmyra in Syria and Ramadi in Iraq is more than 600 kilometers, or nearly 400 miles. The fact that the Islamic State could simultaneously deploy major forces and prevail in those two widely separated battle arenas is concrete evidence to knowledgeable military experts of a highly competent military staff, and a mastery of the operational art of war. The choice of where the Islamic State advances or withdraws also pinpoints the highly strategic nature of the Islamic State’s military operations, which appear geared towards dominance of road networks, essential for controlling the large areas of Syria and Iraq currently claimed by the caliphate.

When America first began its confrontation with militant Islam in the form of al-Qaeda post 9/11, the jihadists were characterized and described as non-state actors. This description is no longer tenable in comprehending the challenge of the Islamic State. This entity may not follow the pattern of a traditional nation-state that participates in the international arena. However, in terms of its structure and the threat it poses, the Islamic State is in fact what it declares itself to be– a state, and one with an army with a skilled general staff, effective logistics and disciplined and highly motivated foot soldiers, able to employ combined arms, including armor and artillery support. Far from the “jayvee team” Barack Obama suggested as a metaphor for the Islamic State in January 2014, this entity has morphed into a most serious and capable military threat, transcending the conventional description of such Islamist phenomena as terrorist non-state actors.

While confusion and disarray reign within the circles of power in Washington, clarity seems to be the defining characteristic of the Islamic State. Despite attempts by U.S. policymakers with no comprehension of the history of Islam to downplay and distort its Islamic credentials, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State’s leadership circles are firmly welded to their historical narrative, which they fully comprehend. Their model is the Prophet Mohammed, who first brought his religious revelation to the Arabian peninsula through the sword. In the century after the Prophet’s death, his companions conquered the largest empire in history up to that time through an unparalleled application of religious fanaticism, combined with innovative military tactics. They were harsh and uncompromising towards the unbelievers, and it is that identical religious zeal that underpins the fierceness and tenacity of the soldiers of the Islamic State.

As the Obama administration gropes for answers to the challenge of the Islamic State, it appears that their new stratagem is to place their hopes in Shiite-dominated Iran, a theocracy that hates America as much as the Islamic State, and which itself is despised by the Sunni Muslim community al-Baghdadi and his caliphate represent. On top of the already monumental mistakes and strategic miscalculations President Obama has been the architect of in addressing the Islamic State, it seems that an even more dangerous error is in the process of being engineered–supporting the anti-American ayatollahs in Tehran as the protector of the Middle East from the Islamic State. I can think of no other policy decision by the Obama administration that would serve the highest hopes and aspirations of the Islamic State so well.

In the ongoing battle between the 21st and 7th centuries, it must be unfortunately concluded that the seventh century is in ascendance.

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It is often remarked that the Ship of State  is the one ship which leaks from the top. Thus even before the blatantly theatrical political funeral dirge conducted at the White House in which President Obama announced that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the sole remaining Republican in his cabinet, would  be leaving of his own accord after serving only 22 months, the usual “unnamed senior sources” representing the administration were already telling their media contacts that Hagel was, in effect, fired.

The New York Times reported that  “officials characterized the decision as a recognition that the threat from the militant group Islamic State will require different skills from those that Mr. Hagel…was brought in to employ.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/hagel-said-to-be-stepping-down-as-defense-chief-under-pressure.html?_r=0) The implication was that Hagel was a timid man, originally brought in to implement Obama’s stated policy of withdrawing from first Iraq and then Afghanistan, while downsizing  the Defense Department. With the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a new policy was called for, and a new defense secretary, the unnamed White House source proclaimed, one more muscular and forceful in confronting the Islamic State.

While the passage of time will undoubtedly provide more leaks, perhaps a book of memoirs by Chuck Hagel and further context, this much is clear; President Barack Obama’s national security strategy in relation to Islamist threats stemming from the Middle East, in particular the Islamic State, has been an unmitigated disaster, and soon-to-be former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam combat veteran and moderate Republican with a strong streak of bipartisanship, has been set up as a scapegoat for the administration’s failures.

What we do know for sure is what both the President and his Defense Secretary had stated on the public record in connection with the Islamic State, also, known  as ISIS, and which President Obama insists on calling ISIL.

In January 2014 Obama told David Remnick of The New Yorker, after Islamist forces in Iraq seized Fallujah and raised the Al-Qaeda flag,  “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”  (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/annals-of-the-presidency)

In contrast, Chuck Hagel had this to say about the Islamic State at a Pentagon press briefing conducted on August 21, 2014:  “They are an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else… They are beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. This is beyond anything we’ve seen.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/21/us-usa-islamicstate-idUSKBN0GL24V20140821)

While the President was initially dismissive of the Islamic State, and has remained tentative and uncertain in his at times awkward responses, Hagel was far from the passive and timid defense secretary he is now being portrayed as by the masters of spin in the White House. His very forceful and articulate warning displays an impressive level of sober realism that is sorely lacking within the President’s national security council, and from Obama himself.

Turning Chuck Hagel into a scapegoat cannot obfuscate the glaring failures cascading out of the ruins of the administration’s inept foreign policy and national security strategy. Obama is a president who loudly proclaims red lines in the sand, such as use of chemical warfare agents by the Syrian regime, and when President Bashar al-Assad defied those red lines with a grotesque massacre of innocents in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama grasped onto the flimsy straw tossed at him by Russia’s President Putin, rendering his red line invisible. His is an administration which sends presidential letters proclaiming friendship to the tyrannical “Supreme Leader” of Iran, who almost daily dishes out hatred and contempt for America, while permitting–perhaps encouraging–a senior unnamed official to tell journalist Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic that Israel’s Prime Minster Netanyahu was, in effect, a fool for trusting President Obama’s pledges on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, because what the administration really sought was to delay an Israeli military operation until the Iranian nuclear program progressed to the point where it was beyond the capacity of the Israel Defense Forces to take it out. (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/the-crisis-in-us-israel-relations-is-officially-here/382031/) No wonder few world leaders maintain trust in the President’s word and integrity.

Beyond the Middle East, President Obama has “engineered” the radical deconstruction of Russia-U.S. relations. It must be recognized that the President himself bears a major responsibility for the deterioration in ties between Moscow and Washington. In previous blog pieces, I have pointed out what I believe have been President Putin’s miscalculations. But why did the President send CIA  Director John Brennan to Kiev at a sensitive point in the emerging Ukrainian-Russia crisis? Not only did the administration engage in needlessly provocative acts that exacerbated the crisis over Ukraine; President Obama has given evidence that he harbors deep contempt-as well as profound ignorance-towards Russia. In an interview with The Economist conducted aboard Air Force One in August 2014 the President proclaimed boldly, “Russia doesn’t make anything.” (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/economist-interviews-barack-obama-2) Perhaps the President is unaware that America’s Atlas V rockets, the vehicle used by the Defense Department to launch U.S. spy satellites into orbit utilize the RD-180 rocket engine in their first stage–and this component is not made in America, but in Russia, the land Barack Obama believes  “doesn’t make anything.”

Like the good soldier he is, Chuck Hagel stood stoically and with his dignity intact, beside President Obama and Vice President Biden in the White House’s State Dining Room, as his thinly-disguised termination was being ceremoniously performed. In time, just as with his predecessors Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, he may pen a tell-all book of memoirs, highly critical of the President. However, we need not wait for a future book to conclude that it is the President and his tightly-knit national security team–a clique which largely excluded and isolated Chuck Hagel– and not the fired defense secretary–who bear the historical responsibility for a record of disastrous decision-making.

In 2008, candidate-for-president Barack Obama proclaimed the audacity of hope in a time of despair, and wrote a very thoughtful and sensible op-ed piece in The New York Times, entitled “My Plan For Iraq,”  in which Obama advocated the retention of a residual military force in Iraq and warned that,  “we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. ” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/opinion/14obama.html?_r=0)

As with so much else connected with President Obama and national security, he has acted contrary to his past words and proclaimed intentions. There is no longer hope; the despair remains. Amid  the debris of a ruined national security strategy, we are left with the audacity of failure, glaring and unhidden, in spite of the best efforts at scapegoating Chuck Hagel.

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In remarks made before White House journalists on August 28, 2014 President Barack Obama, officially the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military, offered his nation the following status of his leadership in the emerging global struggle with the Islamic State. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” so stated President Obama, with a level of reckless candor that is frankly astonishing.

And what about the Commander-in-Chief of the growing jihadi movement  coalescing under the framework of the caliphate that calls itself the Islamic State? The self-appointed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is much too savvy to reveal his grand strategic plan at a public press briefing. However, his public utterances display no ambiguity about his strategic goals and vision: to wage a merciless war of revenge against all the infidels on the planet, the United States  being his number one target. Furthermore, the impressive and swift battlefield successes achieved by the Islamic State over a wide geographic space encompassing  both Syria and Iraq display clear evidence of high-level strategic planning and near-flawless execution. It is unquestionably clear that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, unlike Barack Obama, is not waiting for a strategy to magically be formed; the grand strategy of the Islamic State not only exists; it is being aggressively implemented.

On paper, one could argue, it is inconceivable that the global jihad under the auspices of the Islamic State can defeat the world’s sole remaining superpower. Such rationalization betrays both intellectual conceit and a profound ignorance of history. From the fall of Rome to the Teutonic barbarians to the defeat of the British Empire by American revolutionaries, the historical record is replete with examples of supposedly mightier nations succumbing to numerically and economically inferior opponents on the battlefield. The brutal lesson of history is that very often it is not the side that is more humane and enlightened that prevails. Too often, the inverse is the case, though for reasons only tangentially linked to the display of greater ruthlessness. Strong leadership with a fierce devotion to victory at whatever cost, combined with a high level of strategic and tactical skill, is far more relevant in the martial contest between competing nations and ideologies than the relative level of civilization. Undoubtedly, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is both informed and inspired by what occurred in the century following the death of the Prophet Mohammed; the conquest of the Middle East, Southwest Asia, North Africa and large parts of Southern Europe by Arabian horsemen inspired by an uncompromising religious ideology that offered but one prescription: conquer or die.

With admirable honesty, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel informed the media that, with respect to the Islamic State, “They’re beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. Oh, this is beyond anything that we’ve seen. So we must prepare for everything.”

Since Hagel’s brutally frank characterization of the threat posed to the United States, administration officials and pundits have awkwardly attempted to walk back the perceived threat, arguing that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is too focused on operations in Iraq and Syria at present to be in a position to begin targeting the U.S. homeland-as though these people actually have a pipeline into the innermost thoughts of the caliph of the Islamic State. In reality, the U.S. intelligence community, and by extension President Obama and his administration, have no clear idea of the threat America confronts, or the military and operational capacity of the Islamic State. While frantic arguing ensues over the supposed threat of jihadists with European and American passports returning home to commit random acts of violence, has anyone in the policymaking echelon considered that a declared enemy of the United States who has already displayed an impressive level of operational skill is more likely to attack the American homeland in a manner that achieves far greater strategic consequences than merely bombing a subway or bus?

Until and unless the U.S. has leadership that is as determined, disciplined and focused as is found in the newly established caliphate, we may find the 21st century being overwhelmed and subjugated by the 7th century.

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In the year 680 AD, a military engagement  occurred in the town of Karbala, in present-day Iraq. The forces of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of Islam’s prophet, were defeated by the army of the ruling Umayyad caliph. Hussein was beheaded, and approximately 150 men on both sides died. Based strictly on military casualties,  the Battle of Karbala would be viewed by historians as a mere skirmish. However, the importance of a battle cannot be measured strictly by an accountant’s ledger of losses inflicted and incurred. In terms of its long-term  strategic significance, the Battle for Karbala  must be ranked as one of the most consequential in recorded history, for it created the seismic divide in the Islamic world between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and the for the past 13 centuries the internecine struggle persists as to the correct and legitimate line of succession beginning with the Prophet Muhammad.

The followers who mourn Hussein, his bother Hasan  and father Ali as the first Imams, and martyrs of the true path of succession in Islam, have come to be known as the Shia, a large minority branch in the Islamic world that has been in perpetual theological conflict with the majority within the Muslim world, the Sunnis.  This internal strife within Islam that has endured for more than a millennium sets the context for the fearsome bloodletting occurring in Syria.

In a uniquely insightful column published in Lebanon’s English language newspaper, The Daily Star, entitled “Qusair Portends Great Danger Ahead,” Beirut-based Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri  points out that the victory in that devastated Syrian town for President Assad is in a larger sense a defeat, for it was only with the massive intervention of the Iranian backed and controlled Shiite militia based in Lebanon , Hezbollah, that a triumph could be claimed over heaps of rubble in a once predominantly Sunni populated city.

In response to the destruction of Qusair, prominent Sunni theologians throughout the Arab and broader Muslim world are calling on their faithful to flock to Syria to fight a new Jihad, not against the Western world or Israel, but in opposition to what is being described as a Iranian Shiite plot to dominate the Middle East. Those sentiments are being echoed by renewed sectarian violence in Iraq, and continuing Sunni-Shiite conflict in Pakistan.

Khouri writes with prescient eloquence, “The Hezbollah-Syria-Lebanon dynamic now also feeds into the newest regional problem arena: deteriorating Sunni-Shiite relations across the Middle East, including increasing incidents of outright ethnic cleansing, bombings, and intense provocations that started after President George W. Bush and Prime MinisterTony BlairinvadedIraqand turned it into the first modern Arab battleground of Sunni-Shiite mutual demonization and death. “

Now, a decade after the beginning of the first modern Sunni-Shiite civil war  that resulted from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria has become the center of gravity in a regional sectarian bloodbath  that displays every indication that it will get far more bloody, with no end in sight to the carnage, as the rest of the world lulls itself into believing that it can be mere spectators to frightful instability that will  likely not confine its ruinous impact to the Middle East.

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