.
The west has already done enough harm to Syria without adding good intentions.

I do agree (for different reasons) that Israel should stay well out of it, as should NATO and every other military with its own agenda. This needs to go back to the UNSC where it needs an open-ended debate free from manipulations by the US where the intention is to get ALL sides to stop the violence and enter into talks. Cloud cuckoo land? Probably. But until the major powers, including Israel, are prepared to work for a genuine peace in Syria there will be no end to the bloodshed there, and the present fire will risk becoming a regional inferno.

One of the “most oppressive tyrants of our time”. Really?

(1) Had, up until one year ago, Assad had agreed to get the Golan Heights back along with a shiny new American equipped army and billions of dollars in aid, in return for allowing a small Israeli embassy building on a back alleyway in Damascus surrounded by high walls and a phalanx of Syrian security people in order to make sure the local people are too intimidated to approach the building, all the 972 people and all the Left/progressives in Israel and out would have been ecstatic. Had the uprising began after such a peace deal, everyone would say “stay quiet, we don’t want to endanger the peace agreement which in any event is unpopular with the population and has increased their anger against Assad”.
Assad’s totalitarian dictatorship has been in power for over 40 years, yet the Left/progressives were silent about the massive violations of human rights there. Israeli newspapers sent reporters on foreign passports there in 1999 when Barak was begging Assad Sr to take back the Golan Heigths and they were telling us how progessive, secular and socialist Syria was and how liberated and empowered the women were there, as compared to countries like Saudi Arabia. Yoni and Dimi would have agreed wholeheartedly.
Now, suddenly Assad is an “oppressive tyrant”.

(2) Who says the people in Syria are fighting for a “free democracy”? Why does the Jewish and non-Jewish Left/progressives assume everyone in the world wants what they want?
Why is it assumed that all mass uprisings are made for the sake of free democracy? Maybe the Syrians are fighting to purge the hated Alawite sect (along with their minority Christian allies) from power and put their own Sunni people in power in a Muslim Brotherhood-type Islamic state. Maybe the fighters are saying “why should we let Assad be the dictator…why can’t I be the dictator instead”?

All I know is that Israel should stay the heck out of it. We got badly burned in Lebanon in the past and we don’t need to go around trying to arrange these fouled-up countries and societies to our taste.