Syria - why the Assads will not give up

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I have avoided writing about Syria because I did not feel I had anything particular to say about this horrific situation. I've never been to Syria - plans to go there last year never happened because of the uprising. I did meet a few Syrians recently when I was in Jordan and talked to them about the situation in their country. The view of those I spoke to was that the Assads, with their violent crackdown against unrest, had made preserving the existing regime impossible. Too much blood had been shed. But should the outside world do more than condemn the violence and impose sanctions? I found this comment on an FT article by Gideon Rachman arguing against western military intervention:

The trouble with threatening Assad and his supporters is that they are now quite literally fighting for their lives and those of their families. If they let up at Homs the opposition will gain traction and soon Damascus will become a war zone. Since the West allowed the brutal slaying of the heads of state of Iraq and Libya, Assad has no option but to fight tooth and nail - otherwise the garrot awaits him, his pretty wife and his children - and he knows Britain, America and France will not lift a finger to give him due process or proper legal protection. A law-based West would have been better than the anarchy instigated by Bush and Blair in other people's countries.

This seems to me is the tragic consequence of the West's wars of choice over the last decade - including drone wars and assassinations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. It makes little sense to demand that Assad 'step down' when their is no means to enforce such a demand. Who are we to tell a foreign head of state to step down? The Assads, like Gaddafi of Libya, can no more 'step down' than could Saddam Hussein in 2003. The only way out for dictators who rule by the gun is death. The horrific deaths of Saddam, Gaddafi and even Osama bin Laden show that the West too lives by and endorses the law of the gun. Unlike Saddam or Gadaffi, the Assads still have a few friends left, primarily Russia. Without this they would be doomed. They are, in the long run, doomed anyway so they might as well go down fighting. They have too much blood on their hands to negotiate now, going back to the massacre in Hama in 1982, when the regime killed perhaps 20,000 people in putting down an armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. Every death of a child makes us want to intervene and stop the violence. But every intervention since Afghanistan, including Libya, shows that military intervention has consequences we cannot know.