I don't understand the desperate need of some in government to get rid of Assad. Is getting rid of him worth risking getting into a shooting war with Russia?
Whats at stake for us in Syria?
That's an excellent question, Skeeter.
I think part of what's at stake for "us" is Obama's ego. He decided that Assad, admittedly a bad guy, had to go -- just like Qadaffi, and to hell with the consequences of leaving a vacuum to be filled by ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Another part is that Putin has goaded Obama and Kerry into a pissing contest, which the result that Putin and Russia have become the de facto Great Power in the Middle East, and he's made the US look pitiful. And although they realize something is very wrong, neither Obama nor Kerry seem even to have figured it out, much less how to get out of it.
Yet another part is that Obama/Kerry/Clinton represent the very worst of leftist foreign policy, which has long been committed to overthrowing bad guys (and we can admit that Assad
is a bad guy), with no thought to what comes next.
The truth is that there actually
is something at stake in Syria: the likelihood that an Assad defeat will usher in an aggressive Islamic state that is bound to Iran, and will attack Israel given the chance.... with uncertain results: would Israel employ nukes as a last resort?
Anyway, to avoid that would basically require us to join Russia in propping up Assad, until such time as he can be replaced by some other unsavory but basically rational dictator. And we can't have that, can we?