By Rania Abouzeid, News Desk @ newyorker.com, Aug. 30, 2013

In more peaceful days, Damascus, the Syrian capital, was a forty-five-minute drive from the Lebanese border crossing of Masnaa. Now the proliferation of government checkpoints along the route has lengthened the journey—by how much depends on the vehicle’s passengers. Names can reflect sectarian identity and presumed political positions. Conscription-age men could be dodging compulsory military service. Women might be related to wanted male rebels, or “terrorists,” as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his supporters call them.

Masnaa, the primary official crossing between the two countries, is busy, although many Syrians have found illegal ways to steal across the border. They are flooding into Lebanon. That tiny, volatile sliver of a state, wedged between Syria and Israel, has a population of only four million. Every fourth person in Lebanon is now a Syrian. That figure, a measure of the reach of Syria’s war, would rise rapidly if American missiles hit Damascus [....]