I'm honestly not sure what side we're currently playing on in the Syrian game, especially since no one will tell me what our ambassador to Libya was doing in Benghazi.  But if he's saying that it would make him crack down on the Syrian government, that's a good thing.  If he means that he'll call anyone who opposes the present rotten Syrian government brave lovers of democracy when some of them may be even worse, that's not a good thing.  The Arab Spring in general has replaced bad but Western-friendly moderate Muslim government with really really bad terrorist-leaning Western-hating Muslim governments... all the while presenting them as "freedom fighters."  And THEN we finance and arm these new governments even as we're stripping down our own.