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As regime violence flared, Washington moved policies long viewed as unthinkable, including sanctions targeting the Assad family’s inner circle, oil sanctions as well as an overt, though understated policy of regime change in Damascus. With the armed opposition now a sizeable part of the uprising, and Sunni extremist groups claiming massive bomb blasts in Damascus, Washington is now stuck at a crossroads: continue a policy of sanctions and diplomatic isolation that will help bring down the Assad regime in the medium to long term as the country tips toward greater violence or adopt a more robust approach involving military assistance to the Syrian opposition and perhaps direct military involvement to hasten Assad’s demise and head off what many predict could be a civil war that is likely to suck in regional and international powers alike.

Phase One – coming to grips

In the days and weeks following the outbreak of protests across Syria on March 15, 2011, United States government officials discounted the chances that what became known as the “protest movement” had any chance of bringing down the Assad regime. The reasons made sense: the Assad regime is a minority-dominated regime, with members of the Alawite sect serving in the upper ranks of the country multiple security services and of the Army. Therefore a military coup akin to that in Tunisia or Egypt, where military ousts the ruling family for the sake of the nation as a whole, was unlikely. The memory of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where a Sunni-dominated regime endured international sanctions and isolation and was in the end only ousted through a military invasion, was still fresh in the minds of policymakers in the State Department and White House. And given that the Obama Administration was elected on the platform of withdrawing United States troops from Iraq, another military adventure was off the table. The White House therefore adopted a general policy approach that continues to this day: that it would not say anything in response to the crisis that it did not truly intend to do.