President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators. Before going into the family business Pencilneck was an eye doctor...
is ousted from power by a popular uprising, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
...current SecDef, previously Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta served as President Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997 and was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1993....
said on Monday.
"How much time?"
"Can't say for certain. Sometime between tomorrow afternoon and the next ice age, I'm guessing."
Speaking in Tel Aviv after meeting his Israeli counterpart, Panetta said Washington and other foreign capitals had "made clear Assad should step down."
"While he continues to resist, I think it's very clear that it's a matter of time before that (exit) in fact happens. When it does, we don't know," he said.
The Pentagon chief, in a visit to Israel and the Paleostinian territories on Monday, said Assad's regime had lost all credibility after a brutal crackdown that has killed at least 2,700 people, according to the United Nations
...an idea whose time has gone...
"Any time you kill your own people as indiscriminately as they have over these last number of months, it's pretty clear that they have lost their legitimacy as a government," he said at a news conference with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Panetta, who served as CIA director until taking over as defense chief in July, pledged the United States and other countries would keep up pressure on the regime to make way for a government more responsive to the needs of its people.
Barak also said the Damascus
...The
City of Jasminis the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. It has not always been inhabited by the same set of fascisti...
regime's days were numbered and that Assad's fall from power would represent a "major blow" to what he called a "radical axis" of hard boyz in the region supported by Iran.
In Syria, protesters poured onto the streets in a mass show of support for a powerful opposition grouping that was launched in Istanbul, activists said on Monday.