...he still has all the support that he has. It is a complex society that, I suspect, most of us do not understand. No surprise, as we found out most of our "experts" failed to fully understand the intricacies of the societies that we were fighting (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc).

The Shia Assad ruling clan is rather closely allied with Iran. Our plan was that we could replace them with those Christian and Sunni expatriots, sitting around in London and Washington, pretending that they are representing the Syrian people. Just like Chalabi in Iraq, Karzai in Afghanistan and Jalil in Libya, all bought and paid for on American soil and transplanted back when the timing was right. Not a single one is being accepted for a leader back in those nations. I think that we were/are hoping that installing a Sunni/Christian coalition government would likely break the Syrian alliances to the Shia Iran. Of course there is some other issues involved there, including the fact that Syria is allowing the Russians to expand their naval base in Syria the only one outside of Russia.

A pretty well detailed account of the uprising, the players involved and quotations/polls from credible sources in the following article:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/06/the-neocon-propaganda-machine-pushing-%E2%80%9Cregime-change%E2%80%9D-in-syria/

Excerpts:
"By December, senior United States officials were explicit about their regime change agenda for Syria: Tom Donilon, the US National Security Adviser, explained that the 'end of the [President Bashar al-] Assad regime would constitute Iran's greatest setback in the region yet â a strategic blow that will further shift the balance of power in the region against Iran.'....

...a YouGov poll commissioned by the Qatar Foundation showed last week that 55 per cent of Syrians do not want Assad to resign and 68 per cent of Syrians disapprove of the Arab League sanctions imposed on their country.

According to the poll, Assad's support has effectively increased since the onset of current events â 46 per cent of Syrians felt Assad was a 'good' president for Syria prior to current events in the country â something that certainly doesn't fit with the false narrative being peddled."

While 46 or 55 percentmay seem low compare that to the approval numbers of past or present US Presidents or the US Congress.

Please, I do not want to hear snide remarks about the site, "Counterpunch". As of these days it is one of the ever fewer numbers of news sites that dare presenting views that are opposite to our government's propaganda. It takes balls to do that these days.

Albert