3) Yeah, I probably haven't been paying enough attention. From what I understand there is a bad leader over there, we can't do much about it, we made some efforts that didn't work. So I don't get how that is all our fault? This is why I resist ever playing policeman in the Middle East, and now we're supposed to pay for when our efforts fail? You think we screwed up on purpose? Oh, *%* that! No more "help"...let's just get out.
I can agree with your first 2 comments, but let's look at this one.
Assad was not a "bad ruler" until we decided to start portraying him as a bad ruler. Prior to the civil war he compares fairly with nearby rulers like King Abdullah of Jordan or Turkey's Erdogan. All strong man rulers; only Erdogan subject to actual elections. Abdullah is our guy. Erdogan is his own guy. Assad tries to be his own guy but has ties to Iran and Russia. Not their puppet, but ties.
Since Syria was frisky in Lebanon a decade or 2 ago, Assad has been a fairly reliable actor in the ME. We have worked with him on a number of issues, while agreeing to disagree on others. Israel doesn't like him because he supports Hezbollah, but Hezbollah, too, has moved in the direction of being only a minor irritant - as it seeks to follow a sort-of IRA path toward political legitimacy on the Lebanese political scene.
So . . . 7 or 8 years ago or so, Assad was not our pal but someone we could work with. We would rather have someone friendly to Israel there who wasn't a Russian client and was less friendly with Iran, but we seemed to have reached a workable accommodation.
Then comes the Arab Spring.
At some point after we witnesses the success of Arab Spring in Tunisia and what looked like its success in Egypt, we saw it start several other places - including Libya and Syria. Whereas the protests in Tunisia were clearly spontaneous pro-democracy movements, and the ones in Egypt started that way, by the time we get to some of the later protests we see legit pro-democracy movements being supported and subverted by the US, Saudi Arabia and other actors with no interest in democracy or freedom.
The Arab Spring "mechanism" was viewed as a way to bring down governments we don't like. Assad, Gaddafi, Yanukovich. So we sowed ferment, funded selected protestors and, as things progressed in the desired direction, armed the combatants.
I suggest you glance at
this timeline. Scroll down to 2008 and you can easily see how relations with Assad were going pretty well - until we decided to shift objectives to regime change.
After you check that timeline, I recommend searching for analyses like those of STRATFOR - often substantiated by official documents made available through Wikileaks - which don't pretend that our hands are clean in these pseudo-democratic movements.
