'Assad' supports & harbors Hezbollah & Hamas... It's difficult that a regime could be worse'

(from the sorely missed David Schenker)"During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Syria’s Assad regime was helping insurgents to cross the border and kill Americans... At the Department of Defense—where I worked—we held a dissenting view. While the Pentagon didn’t advocate toppling the Assad regime, we likewise didn’t see an interest in helping to preserve the dictator’s grip on power. In discussing the administration’s Syria policy, then Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman—a former aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who served in five U.S. administrations—recalled Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1943–1946. It was Harriman, Rodman sardonically noted, who once said, “Stalin I can deal with. It’s the hard-liners in the Kremlin who scare me.”...... To wit, one commentator in The National Interest recently opined that “Washington knows [Syrian President] Bashar well and it knows how rational and predictable he is in foreign affairs.” No doubt, Assad hasn’t killed millions like Stalin. But he has spent his first decade in power recklessly dedicated to undermining stability—and U.S. interests—in the Middle East.

Here’s the devil we know: Since 2006 alone, Assad’s Syria has exponentially increased the capabilities of the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, providing the organization with advanced anti-ship and highly accurate M-600 missiles, ... At the same time, Assad continues to meddle (and murder) in Lebanon, harbor and support Hamas, and subvert Iraq. Damascus remains a strategic ally of otherwise isolated Tehran..... it’s difficult to imagine that a successor or replacement regime could be worse.

... It is possible, for example, that Assad might be replaced by an even more overtly hostile member of his Alawite minority sect, (or) be supplanted by a more militant anti-American Sunni junta, triggering a wholesale massacre of Alawites and a massive emigration of Christians, (or) replaced by an Islamist theocracy lead by the Muslim Brotherhood, (or) devolve into chaos, providing an opportunity for Al Qaeda ....none of them would serve U.S. interests. But neither does Assad, and despite some remaining ill-placed optimism that he will reform, it should by now be clear that the regime is irredeemable...

....Regrettably, if the Assad regime weathers this storm, hamstrung by ongoing fears of worst-case succession scenarios in Damascus, decades from now Bashar—or his own son Hafez—will remain a policy challenge for the United States."