Some wars start because people decide they should be started; prepare a case for war, however tenuous, then propagandize and launch it. Others begin by a process of incremental steps – each new provocation from each side only has to be over-reacted to a little bit and eventually you’re in a position where war appears to be your only option. The world had to guard against this path to war by small steps during the Cold War, and even then someone ended up having to take a conscious decision to step back from the brink on more than just that one Cuban occasion, although the other times were less public. Sometimes, the propagandists use incrementalism to prepare their case. Such was the case, I believe, with the Bush administrations push against Iran from 2003 to 2007, which only came to grief when the Baghdad Briefing that was supposed to establish a causus belli was such a debacle that even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t go along with the tale.

Until recently I’ve written that the West has enough understanding odf the massive quagmire that would be an intervention in Syria so as to consciously decide not to go there. But over the past couple of weeks as Turkey has escalated its responses to Syria I have come to believe the current course of the West’s opposition to Syria is an incrementalist one, which has put us on a glide-path to eventual war with the Assad regime. I don’t think it’s manipulated incrementalism, as such, although there are certainly figures within the pro-Israel and R2P interventionist camps who would like to do so. However, I do think it will soon take a conscious decision if we are to step away from another disasterous land war in the Middle East, despite promises last night from both VP candidates that US boots on the ground there are the last thing they want. Mission creep will eventually tell, no matter the illogic of a war that would spark wider regional conflict.

Scott Peterson at the CSMonitor writes that the entry point for the West into a Syrian war may be Turkish belligerence. “Turkey says it doesn’t want war, but it is far from clear where the tit-for-tat with Syria will stop.”

The risks are high for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, not long after the anti-Assad rebellion began, reversed his government’s friendly policy toward “brother” Assad to cheerlead for the opposition – figuring that Assad would in short order go the way of removed Arab Spring dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

The Turkish government “assumed this would be a very fast process [and] wanted to have some stake,” so began a “proactive involvement in this process. Actually, this calculation turned out to be wrong,” says Ersin Kalaycioglu, a political science professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul.

“Now we are into this mess up to our waists, probably, if not our neck. [Turkish leaders] don’t want to get out of it very easily and they are afraid of losing face,” says Prof. Kalaycioglu.

Poor relations, combined with “a few accidents, and a few [incorrect] assumptions and decisions, could go all the way to a greater escalation and perhaps even war, and therefore it’s a very unnerving process,” says Kalaycioglu. The Erdogan government has been making “one error after another, as far a Syria is concerned.”

Turkey is, of course, a NATO member. NATO has aready said it has plans in place to go to Turkey’s aide if war breaks out – and with Turkey forcing down Russian planes or shelling Syrian military targets for six days for each Syrian mortar shell that crosses the border, the trend is surely towards greater escalation.

However, the US is quite capable, on it’s own, of dragging regional allies to a warlike stance and from there it would only take one incident to spark conflict.

There is also talk of  contingency plans for a quick pre-emptive strike if Assad loses control  over his stock of chemical weapons in the civil war. The fear is that  those weapons might otherwise fall into the hands of al-Qaida or  Lebanon’s Islamic militant group Hezbollah.

“There  are dangers involved, and we have to ensure the safety of our country  and the well-being of our citizens,” a senior government official said  in the first public Jordanian confirmation of the presence of foreign  military personnel here. “We are benefiting from the experience of our  allies as we prepare for the worst scenarios.”

The  presence of some 150 Americans at the King Abdullah II Special  Operations Training Center northeast of the capital is a clear message  to Assad that Jordan’s longtime Western allies stand ready to defend the  country if it is dragged into the 19-month Syria conflict. . . .

On Wednesday, U.S.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at a NATO conference of defense  ministers in Brussels that the U.S. has been working with Jordan to  monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria and was helping  Jordan deal with refugees pouring over the border.

Although  the senior government official insisted that the Americans were  “advisers, not troops,” two senior U.S. defense officials said most were  Army special operations forces. The U.S. officials spoke on condition  of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly about  the mission. . . .

The Pentagon estimates it would take 75,000 ground troops just to secure Syria’s chemical weapon stockpile. Those troops might come mostly from Jordan or Turkey with a leavening of Western advisors – but the tanks and aircraft that would first have to quickly reduce Assad’s conventional forces would have to come from NATO nations and from the US in particular – no-one else has the capability.  How Russia would react to US aircraft flying over and bombing close to their small base at Tatrus, where they’ve built up forces which could provide a tripwire for their own involvement, can only be guessed – but incrementalism and the lure of war works both ways.

I honestly hope I’m wrong about this, that either the the Turks take a step back or that the US is working in back-channels to ratchet down French belligerent rhetoric as well as regional tensions, that US actions and rhetoric are just campaign-season moves.  Still, I see a real change in the flow of events, towards eventual war.