Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
My fear is that those who work in the bubble of the White House are coming to believe that because they proclaimed that Mubarak and Qaddafi must step down, that that is why those leaders made or will make their decision on that topic. So that now they need merely utter those magic words and Assad will also "obey."
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).