@Ogion '[...]but the Assad regime has always been a brutal regime with a history of massacring whole villages and torturing and murdering tens of thousands of political opponents.' I beg to disagree. His father's regime was precisely what you describe, and his uncle, who oversaw the massacre at Hama in 1982, is a psychopath.
Even though Bashar al-Assad did upset those hopeful of changing times, after the surpsingly open first year of his presidency (called back then Damascus Spring), these words are way too harsh to describe his government, at least up until 2011.
Now, two other things should be considered. As has been lengthly exposed around here years ago, the Western liberal democracy is not a Heaven-sent institution. It took centuries for feudal loyalties and levy armies to be replaced by a standing state bureaucracy and armies, and it was after the notion of the modern state was firmly established that we eventually developed the modern democracy.
On the other hand, tribal loyalties were one of the main political forces in action in Middle Eastern territories ruled by the Ottomans in the beginning of the last century, and the concept of a standing state bureaucracy was at best being presented to them by the time the Great War was over.
Furthermore, while many have used this as an unreasonable justification for their acts, such as Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, it can't be denied these countries did not exist prior to the League of Nations mandates and thus had no previous national identity. For instance, to deal with this problem, King Idris as-Senussi (King of Libya from independence, in 1951, to 1969) resorted to fostering loyalty to his person and to the institution of monarchy.
He was well aware that Libya had never been ruled as a single country (the Italians, like the Ottomans before them, administered Tripolitania and Cyrenaica as separate things), and was virtually oblivious to the very concept of a modern state, relying instead on its ancient tribal institutions (https://www.amazon.com/History-Modern-Libya-Dirk-Vandewalle/dp/1107615747 excellent book, by the way).
Gaddafi, in spite of all his oddities and abhorrent actions (namely, for instance, Lockerbie), realized this as well. No one with meaningful knowledge of Lybia is surprised by its collapse as a state after his demise.
While Syria is somewhat different, one who is not a professional scholar about Syria can't say the exact number of coups, cabinets and constitutions the country had from 1945 to 1967, when the Baath party took power.
Is the rule of Hafez al-Assad to be celebrated? Certainly not. But one can't expect poverty-stricken former colonies of European powers, whose frontiers were drafted in London and Paris, whose cultural identities as countries simply did not exist, with no previous experience whatsoever with the core concepts and principles of liberal western democracies and/or the very concept of a state bureaucracy to suddenly become modern and stable countries.
To add to this already unrealistic expectation, it should be considered that these nations were in the centre of heated disputes in the Cold War and both the US and the Soviet Unions were heavy players in the region, in a time of globalization as never seen before. Not even the Lebanese democracy survived, and its collapse was certainly very unpleasant to those around.
Now, to the matter at hand. Admittedly, I didn't read about recent developments. However, I do recall Obama trying to argue his case for American intervention claiming Assad had used chemical weapons, and having the UN report state that they could not be sure of who had used these weapons. Conventional logic, considering this would be the only single thing to justify an american intervention and that the military gain of the limited use of such weapons back them was irrelevant, leads one to question whether or not the government was the one to blame.
Still, I find it absolutely amusing how you consistently blame the Assad administration for the whole chaos that developed and turn a blind eye to the fact that NATO did provide a considerable amount of weapons to the rebels, and that Saudi Arabia, while being virtually shielded from criticism by its powerful Western allies, sponsors a large number of radical groups in the region.
Also, the toppling of Mohammed Mossadegh's government, in 1953, in a CIA-lead coup in which media manipulation and a few bribes manage to create a general uprising against a previously popular and respected leader, despite the fact that he did truly represent the interests of the Iranian people, seems to me a clear indication that not all insurrections are legitimate. The CIA had to declassify these documents in 2013. There is virtually no doubt that the CIA managed to orchestrate that. It would be ludicrously naïve, at best, to assume they've abandoned this successful strategy.
Lastly, though, I wonder how the Western media-lead public opinion was taught to fear religious Muslim groups ruling countries, and yet applauds Western successful efforts to oust their secular political opponents. Like when the Muslim Brotherhood won the elections in Egypt. Well, Mubarak represented a secular government, just as Saddam Hussein or Assad.
What exactly do you expect to happen when you shatter the non-religious anti-Western (no longer Mubarak's case, by the way) alternative? Pro-Western secular governments such as Farouk's, Idris' or (the particularly bloody) Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's are clearly not trendy, for very understandable reasons.
Need replacement 
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