A recent interview with University of Oklahoma professor Joshua Landis re: his comparison of the contemporary Levant to interwar Europe: http://youtu.be/_-roW5Y7vbw If you take nothing else away from the video, you'll at least learn that Jerry Seinfeld has a family tie to Aleppo.

Landis's take is that the Syrian conflict is not one in which political boundaries will be redrawn, but rather one in which demographics will be violently resorted (i.e., ethnic cleansing).