http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d70_1329951479
It does seem to be an Al Qaeda production.

Is this the Iraq version of al-Qaeda that "was hunted nearly to extinction" by our Shi'ite allies in Iraq, according to the article? Is it the original al-Qaeda from Afghanistan/Pakistan, that we now understand was destroyed by Osama bin Laden's death? Or is this the Egyptian al-Qaeda that has taken on the global leadership of the group?

The good news is that the CIA has not rushed eagerly to work with our new allies in al-Qaeda, now that they are willing to be the enemies or our enemies. Maybe it is too soon to let auld misacquaintances (9/11) be forgotten.

It might also be good news that no leader has arisen within the Syrian opposition. The US isn't very good at assessing foreign leaders of insurrectionist movements. Look at how deft we were at promoting Ahmad Chalabi as Iraq's future president.

The only thing for sure the outside world knows about Syria is that the Syrian people are not backing down this time in the face of a national campaign of murder by the Assad regime unafraid to slaughter its own people merely for showing up in the street at a funeral. We have perhaps a second fact: the government's hold over its own military is shaky. The army consists of troops raised through conscription, and at the lower levels these men are not keen to fire upon their own families and friends. Hence the need for the government to resort to Iranian forces and help from Lebanese allies. All this has done has fomented hatred among the Syrian population for Iranians, Hezbollah, and Russia as the proxy supporter and protector of these agents.

The temptation to "do something" in the face of such national genocide is obviously very strong, and not just among neoliberals. A good many Arab states would like to see the Assad family go. The template most people seem to have in mind is the campaign against Milosevic and his Serbian regime, involving air power to destroy the regime's tactical advantage in armaments. This campaign did eventually work, but you had all of Europe behind the effort (not militarily, but in terms of policing the Balkans afterward). More importantly, Russia was unable to stand in the way.

At the moment you have Merkozy focused almost entirely on saving the euro, and spending trillions of euros trying to avoid bank failures. Europe is distracted and much poorer than 15 years ago, so can we really expect much help here? Russia on the other hand is no longer weak and is quite willing to make trouble for the US or anybody who wants to intervene in Syria.

That leaves the Syrians to fight the regime on their own, and there is a way to do this - a protracted guerilla war of attrition that may last years and that uses Iraqi tactics of IEDs to destroy the regime's military advantage piece by piece. There is an interesting dimension to this that doesn't get talked about much, and that is that the opposition is a Sunni effort, representing the great bulk of the Syrian population's religious orientation. It is opposed to the Alawites, who are aligned with the Shi'ites in Iran and Lebanon. There are also about 1,000,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria, all of them Sunnis driven out by the Shi'ite regime in Iraq, and some of them must have experience at running a campaign of insurrection. Syria has become a population that is majority Sunni by far, supressed by a Shi'ite oriented government - the reverse of Iraq. If the opposition succeeds, Syria could become a Sunni enclave in the area that stands opposed to the Shi'ite crescent which extends from Lebanon into Iraq and down into Iran. Moreover, the Alawites, who are less than 10% of the population, know now that they are fighting for their survival, because if Assad loses power the Alawites could well be wiped out in a bloodbath. The majority Sunnis know this too; if they lose, they will be subject to decades more of torture and repression by the Alawite government. This has become a fight to the death.

Nor do all Shi'ites recognize the Alawites as completely equal Muslims. The Alawite sect is a strange version of Shi'ite Islam (celebrating Christmas, for example) and it is also secretive. There may come a point where the Shi'ite government in Iran gets tired of supporting them if this civil war drags on. The Alawites, after all, run a secular regime (which is what Ba'athism was all about in the first place), and the Iranians are theocrats. At least on religious grounds, they may not want to invest national treasure in supporting a regime that was allied to Saddam Hussein.

One other element of fluidity in this situation is the role of Turkey. Turkey has at least contemplated "doing something" about the Assad regime and its atrocities, but it would prefer no doubt for this to be a NATO effort. Here we come right back to Russia, which certainly does not want to see another NATO campaign so close to home.

Don't forget the possibility of the West doing something behind the scenes, if that is not happening already. There are three areas the West could use to infiltrate Syria: from the Turkish border to the north, from the Kurdistan border to the east, and from the southern Iraqi border to the south, which is extensive and poorly patroled by the Iraqi government. All the lack of inaction on the public front might be masking some developing efforts to provide armaments, training, and logistical help to the Syrian opposition. While this runs the risk of creating another monster like al-Qaeda, that risk is probably small. Syrians are not Afghanis. Most Syrians in the cities live a modern life not dissimilar from many Turks or eastern Europeans. Most have satellite dish access to European television. Most see Syria as preferably aligned to Europe. Whatever Sunni government arises will probably be light on religion and more interested in economic development on the European model.