Is Obama Finally Getting Serious About Syria?

Could be.

The Associated Press is reporting US closer to declaring Assad’s rule in Syria illegitimate.

There is good news:

Administration officials said Tuesday that the first step would be to say for the first time that President Bashar Assad has forfeited his legitimacy to rule, a major policy shift that would amount to a call for regime change that has questionable support in the world community.

And not so good news:

The tougher U.S. line almost certainly would echo demands for “democratic transition” that the administration used in Egypt and is now espousing in Libya, the officials said. But directly challenging Assad’s leadership is a decision fraught with problems: Arab countries are divided, Europe is still trying to gauge its response, and there are major doubts over how far the United States could go to back up its words with action. [emphasis added]

The doubts may be due to the confusion coming out of the Obama administration.

That is one of the points that Ryan Mauro notes. While it may be true that Obama Moving Towards Regime Change in Syria, it has certainly not been in a straight line. One the one hand, there is:

Secretary of Defense Gates, who boldly said: “The Egyptian army stood on the sidelines and allowed people to demonstrate and in fact empowered a revolution. The Syrians might take a lesson from that.” Senator John Kerry, who has met with Assad, now says attempts to engage Assad must now come to an end. “The chance was lost and that’s the end of it,” he said.

However:

Only this January, Ambassador Robert Ford arrived in Damascus hoping to initiate a new era in Syrian-American relations. As the uprising began and innocents were slaughtered in the streets, the U.S. was slow to react and offered only condemnations of human rights abuses without any substantive change in policy. Secretary of State Clinton even said on March 27: “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

In an effort to bridge the gap, the State Department is declaring that "the window is narrowing."

The question now is whether the Obama administration is serious about Syria--and how far is it ready to go in order to prove it.

Technorati Tag: Syria.