Not such a great "partner in peace" after all:

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has lost legitimacy and is "not indispensable," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday as tensions soared over an assault by Assad loyalists on the U.S. and French embassies in Damascus.

Clinton condemned the Syrian attacks and said Washington did not believe the long-time Syrian ruler would follow through on his promises to reform in the face of escalating protests against his rule.

"From our perspective, he has lost legitimacy, he has failed to deliver on the promises he's made, he has sought and accepted aid from the Iranians as to how to repress his own people," Clinton told reporters in an appearance with European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in Washington.

Clinton's comments marked a significant sharpening of U.S. rhetoric on Assad, whose security forces have waged an increasingly brutal crackdown against protesters inspired by pro-democracy movements elsewhere in the Arab world.

It took a mob of Syrian thugs attacking our embassy to finally get Obama to admit his outreach to and coddling of President Assad was a fantastic blunder - the kind of thing that if a Republican president would have acted so stupidly, the press would have been all over him.

Assad will be considerably harder to dislodge than Mubarak. He still has the loyalty of most of his government who would lose their gravy train if Assad were to depart. And the protestors will continue to be slaughtered because Assad has tanks and APC's and the demonstrators don't.

If there is one thing that Stalin, Mao, and other communist brutes proved, is that you can indeed kill everyone who opposes you in order to have stability. Eventually, Assad will murder everyone who opposes him and cow the rest of the population into remaining quiescent.

Illegitimate or not, Assad will probably outlast Obama in power.