And now the world has again observed, through snippets on social media, what appears to have been a chemical-weapons attack in a rebel stronghold. It has watched the retaliatory strikes of the United States and allies, and heard the Pentagon claim success in the bombing of three facilities associated with Assad’s chemical weapons program. How Syria moved from graffiti, to the near-toppling of its dictator, to that same tyrant’s reassertion of control over a broken country, is a story of ethnic conflict, international connivance, and above all civilian suffering. And it’s not ending now, but only entering a new and perhaps even more dangerous phase.

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Decision-makers in Western capitals had long viewed the Assad regime as a grim model of Middle Eastern stability, but in 2011, they suddenly thought that “people power” would bring down Assad as it had other Arab despots. The Assad regime, however, had something the others didn’t. “Popular resistance” strategies work well against authoritarian systems whose leadership come from the country’s ethnic and sectarian majority, such as Egypt. Soldiers ordered to turn their guns on protestors are faced with a choice: Shoot their brethren among the protestors, or help get rid of those ordering them to do so. This causes a split in the army and security services, which can lead to a toppling of the government.

Assad’s by contrast is a minority government with a kind of fortress of sectarian interests around it. Minority Alawites serve at the core, followed by concentric rings of other minorities (Christians, Shia, etc.), and finally by coopted Sunnis who represent the majority in Syria. Minority army and security officers are therefore farther removed from the majority Sunni population, making them more likely to order fire against protestors than to topple their brethren in power. This has galvanized the Assad regime against the kind of splits that toppled Ben Ali and Mubarak.

But this evidently wasn’t part of President Obama’s calculation when, in August of 2011, he declared that Assad should “step aside,” as if Syria’s strongman would magically leave on his own. To speed up the process, Obama organized European and Arab League allies to adopt similar language, as well as a raft of sanctions on the Assad regime, most notably a ban on purchases of Syrian crude oil, the regime’s lifeline. Totally missing was a plan for removing Assad in the event he didn’t go peacefully.

And Assad wasn’t about to. In the autumn of 2011 and the first half of 2012, multiple UN initiatives failed to bring about sustainable ceasefires or a solution to the hostilities. While Western governments urged Syrians to keep the protests peaceful, the regime’s military escalation to include more snipers, minority militiamen dubbed “ghosts,” and rotary and fixed-wing aircraft caused death tolls to skyrocket. More and more Syrians picked up weapons to defend themselves, and hundreds of local militias were organized under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. The insignia included the old nationalist flag of Syria, but the FSA was more of a franchise than a true army.