Syria: Should the West intervene like it did in Libya?

The debate over foreign intervention in Syria is heating up following the airing of an interview with Qatar's emir on US television last week, when he said he supported sending Arab troops to stop the bloodshed there. 

But is intervention the answer? If so, should the U.S. take part? 

Two of Washington D.C's most prominent Middle East policy analysts and scholars take on some of these tough questions — one arguing for intervention, the other against. 

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Here, Council of Foreign Relations fellow, Steven A. Cook, argues that support for NATO intervention in Libya but not Syria is hypocritical and wrong:

European leaders, "right to protect" advocates, members of Congress, and a bevy of foreign policy intellectuals (with a few notable exceptions) seemed willing to unleash NATO on Qaddafi on humanitarian grounds, but not on Assad. If NATO undertook a military attacks to protect Benghazi from an onslaught, what about Homs? At this point, Assad has killed more people than Qadhafi had on the eve of NATO operations.

In an almost immediate rebuttal in his blog in Foreign Policy, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, Marc Lynch, says intervention will increase casualties and likely lead to something worse than the current conflict: 

Military intervention in Syria has little prospect of success, a high risk of disastrous failure, and a near-certainty of escalation which should make the experience of Iraq weigh extremely heavily on anyone contemplating such an intervention. There is no magic number of deaths at which the U.S. must embark on a self-defeating and foolish adventure.

Either way, it's about to get interesting. 

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