You're kidding, right? Do you really think that State and CIA sit at their desks playing video games all day, and don't brief seniors? That's odd, because I certainly know folks who get dragged over the White House first thing in the morning to do precisely that.
There are no illusions that calling on Assad to go will change the situation in and of itself. However, calling on him to go:
1) strengthens the momentum of the protests
2) more generally helps position the US in the region vis-a-vis democratization/the Arab Spring/etc
3) reinforces the earlier move made Saudi Arabia
We can debate whether that is the right call--I think it was. However, there's no evidence that it was taken in a bubble (and if so, it was a pretty large bubble, since the entire EU did the same thing).
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