"... How we overlooked our own blindingly obvious national interest in the demise of the Assad regime"

Notes from an Isramerican Senator & someone who needs no introduction: Jeffrey Feltman!

"The U.S. administration has pretty much exhausted all the possible ways to put pressure on Assad's regime - sanctions, rebukes, hints that the regime "is not indispensible" – other than explicitly calling for Assad to step down. And that's exactly what members of Congress would like the Administration to do.
"Noting that Assad has lost legitimacy without calling for his immediate departure from power trivializes the death of thousands of Syrians killed by Assad's thugs", Rep. Gary Ackerman (New York, Democrat), said Wednesday during the hearing of the Middle East and South Asia Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, titled "Axis of Abuse: U.S. Human Rights Policy Toward Iran and Syria ... the Obama administration has barely scratched even the surface of their utility in aiding the people of Syria in throwing off this regime of murderers and thieves and torturers of children. History will record not only how we mostly ignored the people of Syria in their hour of need but, worse, how we overlooked our own blindingly obvious national interest in the demise of the Assad regime"...

Ackerman clarified that he is not calling for military intervention in Syria, but that "the President must call for Bashar Assad, the “blood-soaked dictator”, to step down. "Trifling with the lives of the people of Syria with nuanced, lawyerly phrases like ‘President Assad must understand he is not indispensable’ is shameful", the congressman said.
Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, who represented the administration at the hearing, along with Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State from Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Location, shared the Congress members’ contempt for the Syrian leader, saying that "Bashar al-Assad is not a reformer but someone whose rule relies on terror, theft and torture".