Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

[jpatter666]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

You obviously do not have to hand a history of the Falklands war where Margaret Thatcher won and raised her standing through the roof.

A Conservative could pull that off as Thatcher did. Also witness Bush and Iraq (before it all went to hell). If Obama did it it would alienate his base completely and Republicans would *not* turn to him. Indeed, they'd claim it was a "Wag the Dog" scenario.

Apples and Oranges.

[BadJuju]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Yes, I think the time for that has passed. Bush spent the good will of the American people with Afghanistan and Iraq. Libya wasn't a focus because it was so fast and impersonal.

[raja]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Agreed -- but I'm hoping he was only right on the first half of the call and that he's wrong on the regional conflict. Hopefully, the near-decapitation of Assad's leadership circle by the resistance will mean Syria implodes and does not spread.

I think it's unlikely that the 2nd half of EJ's call -- "the inexorable escalation of Syria's civil crisis into civil war and regional conflict" -- will materialize.

Two reasons:

First, some Arab countries are pro-rebels, so we wouldn't have a unified Arab pile-on against the rebels like we saw against Israel in the past.

The United States and dozens of other countries moved closer on Sunday to direct intervention in the fighting in Syria, with Arab nations pledging $100 million to pay opposition fighters and the Obama administration agreeing to send communications equipment to help rebels organize and evade Syria’s military, according to participants gathered here.

Second, the trend lately has been going against the Arab dictators:

The Arab Spring is a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world that began on 18 December 2010. To date, rulers have been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings have erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests have broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Sudan; and minor protests have occurred in Lebanon, Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Western Sahara, as well as clashes at the borders of Israel in May 2011.

Sure, the the sectarian split in the Arab world between Sunnis and Shiites is there, but I see open warfare between them as unlikely. Remember, the Arab obsession against Israel (historicaly justified, in my opinion, and requiring some kind of fair resolution) is the main focus of Arab politics, and what's happening in Syria has nothing to do with Israel. What would other Arab countries have to gain by stepping into a Syrian civil war?

Of course, this doesn't mean that the situation with Iran won't escalate . . . but that wouldn't be "the inexorable escalation of Syria's civil crisis into civil war and regional conflict" that EJ is predicting.

[jk]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

what's happening in syria has quite a bit to do with israel. syria is the transit point for arms shipped from iran to hezbollah. cut syria away from shiite iran and you cut off the lifeline of shiite hezbollah.

[raja]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

what's happening in syria has quite a bit to do with israel. syria is the transit point for arms shipped from iran to hezbollah. cut syria away from shiite iran and you cut off the lifeline of shiite hezbollah.

Of course, none of the Shia governments are going to like seeing Shia Assad toppled . . . .

But what is Iran going to do about it?

If you're talking about shipping weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraq is geographically between Syria and Iran -- what did Iran do when we took over Iraq?

Can you give me a scenario suggesting how a wider conflict could spread from the downfall of Syria's government?

[jk]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Of course, none of the Shia governments are going to like seeing Shia Assad toppled . . . .

But what is Iran going to do about it?

If you're talking about shipping weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraq is geographically between Syria and Iran -- what did Iran do when we took over Iraq?

Can you give me a scenario suggesting how a wider conflict could spread from the downfall of Syria's government?

assad is not shia. he is alawite. you really ought to know the facts before creating theories about them.

one thing iran will do is retaliate- the small beginning was the recent blowing up of israeli tourists in bulgaria.

iran actually has airplanes and ships which allow it to ship weapons other than by land routes. their difficulty is, i believe, lebanese airspace. i am not sure about all the issues here, but my impression is that weapons have been shipped by air to syria, then transported on the ground into lebanon.

there are shia populations in suadi arabia and the rest of the gulf states. they could become more active in a military sense, and attempt to create "civil wars" there, too. it is interesting to contemplate what role the shia-led gov't of iraq might play.

[don]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Desert Pitch

By PICO IYER

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING


By Dave Eggers
312 pp. McSweeney’s Books. $25.

Where is our new-millennium Norman Mailer? It’s startling, 50 years on, to look back at the work of Mailer in the 1960s — from “The Presidential Papers” to “The Armies of the Night” — and see such unabashed ambition, such reckless audacity and such a stubborn American readiness to try to save the Republic from itself and bring it back to its original promise. Mailer’s very titles — “Advertisements for Myself,” “An American Dream” — told us he was on a mission, committed to the transformation of country and self, and even as he gave himself over to unremittingly private (and epic) meditations on God, the Devil, cancer and plastics, he was also determined to remake the civic order. He ran for mayor of New York City, he tried his hand at directing movies and in 1955 he helped start an alternative weekly known as The Village Voice. Part of the exhilaration of Mailer was that he cared so ravenously even when he failed; he was shooting for the moon even when he shot himself in the foot.

Dave Eggers comes from a much more sober, humbled, craft-*loving time, and his latest novel is the opposite of a failure: it’s a clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad. But for all the difference between their generations, you can feel in Eggers some of the hunger, the range and the unembarrassedly serious engagement with America and its ideals that gave Mailer’s work such force. Eggers asserted his bravado — along with some tonic self-*mockery — in the very title of his first book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (a title of which Mailer would have been proud); he followed it up with a very different kind of book, a novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” about the impenitent determination of two young Americans to travel the world giving money away. Yet even as he has written seven substantial books in 12 years, Eggers has also established his own publishing house, bristling with attitude and backward-looking invention. He’s started two magazines whose names (Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and The Believer) openly declare their interest in homemade whimsy and optimism — or, you could say, in the past and in the future. He’s established nonprofit writing and tutorial centers across the country and, in his spare minutes, helped write two feature movies, “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Away We Go.”

Like Mailer, he’s almost underrated precisely because he’s so ubiquitous and dares us to mock him with his unapologetic ambitions. Yet where Mailer was consciously working in a deeply American grain, with his talk of revolution and transcendence, Eggers speaks for a new America that has to think globally and can’t be sure where the country fits on the planetary screen. And where Mailer was bent on showing us how America could remake the world, Eggers, with ferocious energy and versatility, has been studying how the world is remaking America. Most of our great contemporary examinations of cultural sampling and bipolar belonging come from writers with immigrant backgrounds. It’s invigorating, in that context, to see how Dave Eggers, born in Boston to classic fifth-generation Irish stock (his mother was a McSweeney) and raised in Lake Forest, Ill., has devoted himself to chronicling the shifting melting pot, seeming to tell others’ stories more than his own.

In his fourth major book, “What Is the What,” he gave us a nonfiction novel about Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese “Lost Boy” who survives wars at home and refugee camps abroad only to find that his problems are by no means behind him when finally he gets to Atlanta, and the Land of the Free. Some critics may have bristled at the notion of a young white American writing the story of a real-life African villager, but it took a writer of Eggers’s artistry (and vulnerability) to give Deng’s story its heartbreaking power. In his next (nonfictional) work, “Zeitoun,” Eggers turned the story of Hurricane Katrina into a brilliantly structured and propulsive narrative whose all-American protagonist just happened to be a Muslim house-painter brought up in the Syrian coastal town of Jableh, married to a former Southern Baptist from Baton Rouge and eager to construct a new life through hard work and tending to others. The American Dream, the author was reminding us, is coming to us now in Arabic.

In both “Zeitoun” and “What Is the What,” Eggers’s heroically self-effacing prose revealed the people we blindly walk past on our city streets every day. “Zeitoun,” in fact, began as part of a Voice of Witness series of oral histories through which Eggers is hoping to inform us of those faraway places whose destinies are ever more central to our own. Like Mailer, Eggers seems ready to take America by the scruff of its neck and ask us what we’re going to do about injustice and a sense of community; but where some writers celebrate America as a home for second lives and triumphant reinvention, Eggers seems bracingly wary of happy endings, as if convinced that our real work is still ahead of us.

In “A Hologram for the King” — a kind of “Death of a Globalized Salesman,” alight with all of Arthur Miller’s compassion and humanism — Eggers at once pushes that project forward and, characteristically, gives us an entirely different and unexpected story. Alan Clay is a 54-year-old self-employed consultant (as everyday and malleable as his name) first introduced on the 10th floor of a glassy Hilton in Jeddah, where he’s come to try to redeem his fortune, and America’s. Day after day Alan is driven, usually late, to a large white tent in the desert — part of the King Abdullah Economic City, or KAEC (as in “cake”) — where three young colleagues sit around with laptops waiting to show a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah, on behalf of Reliant, an American company that is “the largest I.T. supplier in the world.” Day after day, the king fails to arrive and the Americans lie around, fret about the absence of Wi-Fi and kill time in the emptiness. Desperate for something to happen, Alan lances a cyst on his neck with a crude knife — and later a needle — just to feel the blood flow.

“Hologram” flashes past in an appropriately quick series of brief, displacing passages with plenty of space around them for us to feel the vacancy and nowhereness; if Mailer attached himself to Hemingway in honor of the older writer’s unabashed competitiveness and machismo, Eggers here is drawn more to the best thing in Hemingway, his style of clean lines and sharp edges. Scene after scene is so clear and precise — “A plume of smoke unzipped the blue sky beyond the mountains,” a “pair of headlights appeared as a blue sunrise beyond the ridge’s ragged silhouette” — that it’s easy to overlook just how strong and well wrought the writing is.

The vast empty spaces of the desert stand, of course, for the holographic projections that now determine Alan’s (and America’s) destiny, while Saudi Arabia, a puritan kingdom where everyone seems to be boozing on the sly, is the perfect Other that constantly confounds and defeats its New World visitors. In the long, empty days Alan befriends a penguin-shaped young Saudi who tools around in a 30-year-old Caprice and sports Oakley sunglasses above his handmade sandals (he once spent a year in Alabama); he meets lonely expats and looks in on an embassy debauch where a man in a spacesuit is “feigning weightlessness.” Every detail perfectly advances a vision of American aspiration at a time of economic collapse and midlife crisis: just two floors below a gleaming condo in the desert that speaks for the virtual future that the Saudis (and Americans) are counting on is another room where 25 foreign laborers are squeezed into a tiny space, exchanging blows over a discarded cellphone.

Yet even at home, we come to see, Alan has been living in a house for sale where he’s taken for a “ghost”; he’s run out of money to pay his daughter’s college bills, and the only one who has ever fought for him is his “constantly cruel ex-wife.” Over a long career working for Fuller Brush and Schwinn bicycles and a dozen others, he’s somehow encouraged the outsourcing of manufacturing that has led to both him and his country becoming redundant. In Florida, he eats from vending machines, and in his home in suburban Boston he watches old Red Sox DVDs again and again. At the book’s opening, his neighbor Charlie, who’s recently discovered transcendentalism and speaks (as Mailer might have) of “grandeur and awe and holiness,” walks into a lake to his death. In Alan’s America, even Walden Pond has become a cesspool.

Eggers’s command of this middle-*management landscape is so sure — and his interest in the battle between humanity and technology so insistent — that his book might almost be a DeLillo novel written for the iPhone Generation, though delivered by DeLillo’s more openhearted and Midwestern nephew. Eggers’s inhabiting of the terms and tics of a distinctly American consciousness is as remarkable as, in earlier books, his channeling of Sudanese and Syrian sensibilities. He knows how businessmen, faced with a terrible proposal, will say, “Let’s table it for now”; he registers how door-to-door salesmen point out, “A stranger rings, a friend knocks”; he cites the wisdom of Jack Welch. To a world of glass and emptiness — “I feel like a pane of glass that needs to be shattered,” Alan tells another consultant — he brings his rather old-fashioned interest in neighborhood values and service. And his Saudi Arabia sounds to me note-perfect, from the soldier seated in a beach chair next to a Humvee, soaking his feet in an inflatable pool, to the secret drag races in the desert.

Nearly every action in the book carries a symbolic resonance: each time Alan is approached by a foreign woman, he becomes disengaged and, in fact, impotent, and when finally he does go into a local hospital for his cyst, he’s worked on by a team made up of Chinese, English, German, Italian, Russian and mongrel Lebanese medical professionals. Yet underneath the global blueprint is a story human enough to draw blood. Anyone who’s traveled will recognize the plaintiveness and vague menace of the Saudis who loom before Alan, or the likable Saudi Panza who tries to scroll to a Fleetwood Mac song on his iPod as Alan prepares to tell him another corny joke. The buddy movie is clearly a significant form for Eggers, but, like Hollywood, he has upgraded it: from the frat-boy do-goodism of “You Shall Know Our Velocity” to a vehicle that features a young Muslim and an aging American, and asks what happens when velocity gives out.

At first glance, a reader might wonder what a story about a flailing American businessman trying to win a contract over the Chinese in the Saudi desert has to do with Eggers’s celebrated memoir about losing both of his parents within five weeks at the age of 21, and tending to his younger brother. But the strength of all his work comes from his sense of loss and pain, mixed with his decidedly American wish to try to bring his orphaned characters to a provisional shelter. It’s Eggers’s tragic sense — “Were scars the best evidence of living?” he writes here — that gives fiber and nuance to his desire for something better, and ensures that his hope for some kind of understanding never becomes merely sentimental. Alan speaks for something essential to Eggers — and poignant — in his constant oscillation between the wish to do the right thing and his awareness that he doesn’t have a clue what the right thing might be.

Like Mailer, in other words, Eggers has a vision, with the result that there’s nothing random about the projects he takes on or the ways he pursues them; to the casual observer, he may seem all over the place, but underneath the wild diversity of his interests is a profoundly searching and meticulous craftsman who could hardly be more focused. “A Hologram for the King” is, among other things, an anguished investigation into how and where American self-confidence got lost and — in the central word another lonely expat uses for Alan — “defeated.” At one point, a fellow passenger on a plane mentions to Alan how even the Statue of Liberty is depicted moving forward, so committed is America to the future tense; four *pages on, Alan recalls being told, at length, about how an all-important contract for blast-resistant glass in Freedom Tower, built on the ashes of the World Trade Center, has been given to a Chinese company, working (to compound the insult) from an American patent.

In places, the book becomes almost a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands, knew struggle. Alan’s father, a World War II veteran who still has shrapnel in his lower back, rages at his son for helping to take business abroad; the deeper sorrow is the suggestion that moral clarity and a sense of purpose also got outsourced in the process. As he mourns the decline of a time when men were more in touch with their animal selves and an outer wilderness could save us from a wilderness within, Alan reminisces about the hunting trips he took with his dad as a boy, thinks about the time he took his daughter to see one of the last launchings of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral (and they met an old-fashioned, in fact Maileresque, American hero and explorer, an astronaut). When Alan is invited by a local friend to a Saudi mountain village, he tries to reach back to a world of John Wayne certainties and, cradling a gun, blows up the one human connection he’s so happily made.

This may all sound a little too much like metaphor — or romanticism — but Eggers’s sense of loss is hard-earned and his feeling for his characters as affectingly real as his epigraph from Beckett (“It is not every day that we are needed”). At times, his book reminds one of Douglas Coupland’s deeply wistful tales of Generation X’s search for belief and direction, at other times of the weightless suburban drifters of Haruki Murakami’s world, all but longing (in “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” say) for an earlier era of intensity and war. A sense of impermanence and possible disaster is always very close in Eggers’s work — here it’s sometimes devouring — and that is what makes his good nature and hopefulness so rending, and so necessary. Every now and then he pulls back from his engagingly stumbling characters to suggest a larger order: “The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.”

In the end, what makes “A Hologram for the King” is the conviction with which Eggers plunges into the kind of regular working American we don’t see enough in contemporary fiction, and gives voice and heft to Alan’s struggles in an information economy in which he has no information and there’s not much of an economy. At one point, with nothing to do, Alan starts writing to his daughter to persuade her to forgive her mother, the ex-wife who has all but destroyed him. “People think you’re able to help them and usually you can’t,” he writes. “And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint.” Such is the fragility of Alan’s situation, though, that even that modest hope seems far from guaranteed, mostly because Alan is such a non-virtual man, the opposite of a hologram.

Norman Mailer probably hated the fact that many of us consider his great, essential narrative to be his “nonfiction novel” about Gary Gilmore, “The Executioner’s Song”; the whole long, tragic story is delivered with extraordinary documentary fidelity and restraint, and yet only someone as obsessed as Mailer was with rebellion and possession could have invested the tale with such intensity. In much the same way, Eggers has developed an exceptional gift for opening up the lives of others so as to offer the story of globalism as it develops and, simultaneously, to unfold a much more archetypal tale of struggle and loneliness and drift. Public and private explorations come together, and as this groundbreaking writer grows wiser and deeper and more melancholy, evolving from telling his own stories to voicing America’s, he might be asking us how we can bring the best parts of our past into a planetary future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/bo...html?ref=books

[raja]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

assad is not shia. he is alawite. you really ought to know the facts before creating theories about them.

As far as knowing the facts . . . .

Syria is approximately three quarters Sunni, but its government is predominately Alawi, a Shia sect that makes up less than 15% of the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi%27a...elations#Syria

and . . . .

Alawis are self-described Shia Muslims, and have been called Shia by other sources including the influential Lebanese Shia cleric Musa al-Sadr of Lebanon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawi

one thing iran will do is retaliate- the small beginning was the recent blowing up of israeli tourists in bulgaria.

That was in retaliation for killing Iran's nuclear scientists.
And . . . that's a far cry from starting a "regional conflict" such as EJ suggests.

iran actually has airplanes and ships which allow it to ship weapons other than by land routes. their difficulty is, i believe, lebanese airspace. i am not sure about all the issues here, but my impression is that weapons have been shipped by air to syria, then transported on the ground into lebanon.

I'm not saying Iran would like it if Assad was kicked out . . . but I don't see them starting a regional conflict over it.

there are shia populations in suadi arabia and the rest of the gulf states. they could become more active in a military sense, and attempt to create "civil wars" there, too. it is interesting to contemplate what role the shia-led gov't of iraq might play

Perhaps EJ needs to define what he means by "regional conflict". If it means "conflict in the region" . . . well, there is always conflict in the region, right? No one will ever go wrong predicting that. Heck, three Arab dictators have been toppled in the last year or so. So, I hope that's not EJ's prediction, for if it were, it would be pretty lame.

If "regional conflict" means conflict between countries -- which I think was EJ's meaning -- then "attempts to create more civil wars" doesn't qualify. I'll say it again . . . I doubt that Assad's downfall would be a tipping point leading to a regional conflict in the sense of interstate war.

[raja]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Desert Pitch

By PICO IYER

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING


By Dave Eggers
312 pp. McSweeney’s Books. $25.

Hey Don, I really like some of the stuff you post.

Would it be possible to boldface a couple of the key points when you make a long post -- like c1ue often does. Sometimes all the info on the Net gets a bit too much, and if a post is long I'll just tend to skip it if I can't quickly see what it's about.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Can you give me a scenario suggesting how a wider conflict could spread from the downfall of Syria's government?

I can think of a couple realistic possibilities:

1.)The void that existed in Northern Iraq that became a somewhat autonomous-ish Kurdistan within Iraq could expand to include a portion of Syria territory with Syrian ethnic Kurds which could cause a growing rift with Turkey which has a long history of conflict in suppressing Kurdish independence in the region including it's own significant and perpetually unhappy Kurdish minority.

2.)Asymmetric attacks against Israel being launched from Syria/Lebanon as a direct/indirect result of the instability/fall of the Syrian regime and the power vacuum that inevitably follows which would compel Israel to act in proactive self defense.

3.)The fall of the Assad regime and/or it's retreat to a smaller and more defensible position leads to sectarian division and potential post Assad civil war and long term instability, much like former Yugoslavia and the rally cry of "someone has to do something" compels intervention.

4.)Concern over Syria's WMDs(yes I know credibility in this regard is low, but Syria's development/possession of them seems to be well supported) compels some to consider a limited intervention. It must be noted that there are plenty of examples of fairly quite/covert intervention to mitigate WMD risk that have been quite successful.

5.)The fall of the Assad regime leads to a hard shift that overshoots in the opposite direction towards an islamist/fundamentalist movement/government...much like Iran post Shah.

And like Iran's military post Shah, the Syrian military may be unable to act as a calming/stabilizing force due to it's strong alignment with the Assad regime.

Egypt's military is viewed by many as a symbol of Egyptian nationalism...can the same be said of Syria with it's military? I'm thinking not. I'm thinking less Egypt(where it's too soon to tell if it will blow apart at the seams) and more Yugoslavia post Tito.

I'm not going to try and predict how long it will take to transition to a post Assad Syria.......but it's inevitable that the Assad regime can't continue in it's current iteration for much longer. Even if Assad is able to consolidate his grip on power through a level of violence that would make 1982 Hama seem like a tea party I can't imagine Syria would be able to recover economically without huge external support.

The closest example of potential success for Assad would probably be Sri Lanka.

After many years of insurgency and civil war, and with considerable economic/military/political support from China....Sri Lanka was able to decisively liquidate the last Tamil Tiger militant movement...the level of violence and crimes against humanity/war crimes seems quite considerable......but with China playing diplomatic top cover Sri Lanka has been able to win the civil war....now it has to win the peace.

But I would rate Assad's chances of survival at only a fraction of that of Sri Lanka's civil war government.

[don]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

Would it be possible to boldface a couple of the key points when you make a long post -- like c1ue often does. Sometimes all the info on the Net gets a bit too much, and if a post is long I'll just tend to skip it if I can't quickly see what it's about.

A number of 'Tulipers (on other postings) have noted they feel the opposite way - no bold, please, let me figure out what's noteworthy for myself. Occasionally I've excerpted a piece but overall feel a service to the author in presenting what he has written. A minor conumdrum.

[raja]

Re: Essential Trends - Part II-A: The End of Engineered Stagflation - Eric Janszen

I can think of a couple realistic possibilities:

1.)The void that existed in Northern Iraq that became a somewhat autonomous-ish Kurdistan within Iraq could expand to include a portion of Syria territory with Syrian ethnic Kurds which could cause a growing rift with Turkey which has a long history of conflict in suppressing Kurdish independence in the region including it's own significant and perpetually unhappy Kurdish minority.

Conflict between Turkey and ethnic Kurds would primarily be about Turkey maintaining its present Kurd population within it's borders. The most that could occur would be some sort of a Kurd/Turkish war, which would not develop into a regional conflict involving other countries.

2.)Asymmetric attacks against Israel being launched from Syria/Lebanon as a direct/indirect result of the instability/fall of the Syrian regime and the power vacuum that inevitably follows which would compel Israel to act in proactive self defense.

In the short and medium term, I think a power vacuum in Syria would focus Syrians on the process of filling that vacuum, rather that engendering attacks on Israel. The Syrians would be too busy attacking each other, at the very least politically.

3.)The fall of the Assad regime and/or it's retreat to a smaller and more defensible position leads to sectarian division and potential post Assad civil war and long term instability, much like former Yugoslavia and the rally cry of "someone has to do something" compels intervention.

That would not be a "regional conflict".

4.) Concern over Syria's WMDs(yes I know credibility in this regard is low, but Syria's development/possession of them seems to be well supported) compels some to consider a limited intervention. It must be noted that there are plenty of examples of fairly quite/covert intervention to mitigate WMD risk that have been quite successful.

That would not be a "regional conflict".

5.)The fall of the Assad regime leads to a hard shift that overshoots in the opposite direction towards an islamist/fundamentalist movement/government...much like Iran post Shah.

And the Syrian islamist/fundamentalists invade Israel? Not likely.