"Obama Stops Bashing Bashar"
http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2015/1/23/obama-softens-assad-syria-rhetoric.html
For the first time since Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, the State of the Union speech on Tuesday made not a single oblique reference to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who has overseen a brutal crackdown on his own people in a conflict that has cost more than 220,000 lives.
It’s hardly a secret that the Obama administration’s plan to topple Assad has long since been derailed by the rise of ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, as the White House chooses to call it, also known as ISIS, Da’esh, or just the Islamic State), a rebel faction that now controls over one-third of Syrian territory and swathes of Iraq. But the evolution of Obama’s rhetoric across successive State of the Union speeches illustrates just how baldly the U.S. has abandoned the prospect of regime change in Syria – something it once demanded.
On Tuesday night, Obama, discussing his additional support for Syria’s “moderate” rebels — a half-hearted training program that few believe will do much — neglected to mention why the U.S. began arming them in the first place: to fuel their uprising against Assad. Instead, he cited extremist threats in the Middle East, saying: “We’re … supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism.”
Compare that to what Obama said about Syria in his State of the Union in January 2012, when that country’s war was just getting into full swing. Then, Obama told the American public that he had “no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change cannot be reversed, and that human dignity cannot be denied.”
<more at the link>
I guess Obama finally figured out that Assad isn't going anywhere. But we still have that stupid and counterproductive policy of arming a relative handful of rebels.
