Unsure
Syria has a police state for a reason
Democracy is working fine in Afghanistan and Iraq and Egypt
Painting Assad as a bad guy who wants power because he is an egomaniac is simplistic
Assad is a bad guy. He is evil. He sits atop a regime that tortures children. This isn't even hyperbole, the list of atrocities carried out by the regime diminishes faith in the whole human race. The extent of the evil and the brutality of that regime simply cannot be overstated.
What complicates the situation and makes it anything but simple is the fact that terrorists who are just as evil have joined the fight against him with their own agenda. No one wants to turn Syria into Al Qaeda controlled territory either.
But somewhere in the middle of that are a lot of regular ordinary Syrians who have had their world crash down around them in an appalling way.
They have been shot at, used as human shields, been sniped at in the streets, attacked with mortars, bombed by jets, and now gassed with sarin. Their hospitals have been systematically targeted and bombed. Their children have been tied screaming to the front of tanks attacking their homes. Atrocity after atrocity after atrocity has been inflicted on them.
This is the Rwanda of our time, and like Rwanda it is a complex situation where none of the factions have completely clean hands.
But as the death tolls mount into the hundreds of thousands, and as the refugees stream out by the millions, as children starve, and people die for lack of even the most basic health-care, the question mounts: what are we going to do about it?
The fact that it is complicated and hard is really no excuse for total inaction. As in Rwanda we will look back on these days with considerable shame.