Podcast: Will Obama Intervene in Syria?: The New Yorker One popular understanding of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's war against his countrymen holds that it is a sectarian conflict between the Alawite minority and the Sunni majority. As Jon Lee Anderson says on this week's Political Scene podcast, the situation is not so simple. Anderson and Dexter Filkins talk with host Dorothy Wickenden about Syria's ongoing civil war and whether or not the United States will intervene. "There's also Turkoman, Kurds, non-Alawite Shiites, and so on," Anderson says. So we have the most complex mosaic of rivalries, of resentments, of sectarian and ethnic girevences - even within rebel-held territory - which could bring about multiple little civil wars within the larger one. Even in that landscape, the pressure on President Obama to intervene is growing. But the President is weighing the United States" options carefully. "When Obama looks at Syria," Filkins says, "he sees Baghdad in 2003. And we all remember that movie.