"There is reason to doubt that Washington really wants Assad to fall!"

"...Mr. Assad has successfully kept out the international press and has prompted the failure of the UN monitor mission by restrictions and deliberately inadequate protection. The operators of amateur social media have not been able to compensate effectively for such blockage. World leaders could be hesitant to create an intervention policy based on the killing of children, for example, when it is not fully clear who did the killing.
They have perhaps learned a lesson from the babies allegedly killed in Kuwait in 1990 by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers according to the congressional testimony of Kuwaiti diplomats. When investigators attempted to confirm these stories after Iraq was expelled from Kuwait in 1991, they turned out to be fabrications.
Despite its rhetoric condemning the Syrian regime, there is also reason to doubt that Washington really wants Assad to fall. Assad’s regime is “the devil we know,” and one with demonstrated weaknesses: Witness its expulsion from Lebanon and its defeats by Israel. At the same time, it has a professional and mostly loyal army and an identifiable and mostly loyal power base in one-fifth of the population: the Alawite and Christian minorities.
The Free Syrian Army and other adversaries of Assad are far less professional and unified, with a possibly far more volatile power base, the country’s Sunni Muslim majority..."