Better the devil you know.<p>The reason we (i.e. &quot;The West&quot;) left Saddam in place until the US needed an easy target after 9&#x2F;11 is that despite being a dictator and mass-murderer, his reign kept Iraq relatively stable. As soon as he was taken out of the equation other forces began to fight for dominance and now we have a huge mess on our hands that&#x27;s arguably worse than where we started.<p>The same is true for most of the dictatorships toppled during the &quot;Arab Spring&quot;. This is partially why Russia was against intervening in Syria from day one and why nobody seems to think Saudi Arabia or Qatar or any of the other bloody dictatorships in that region are worth disrupting.<p>In many cases the actual borders of these countries are pretty arbitrary and split up various ethno-religious groups (that often historically hate each others&#x27; guts) in weird ways. As soon as you tell them to self-govern and dispose of the dictators you end up with all these directly opposing interest groups suddenly being able to get at each others&#x27; throats.<p>It&#x27;s not that Assad is a nice person or that it&#x27;s more ethical to leave an evil person in place than to dispose of him, it&#x27;s just that mindlessly handing out guns and expecting an oppressed people to be rational is pretty much the worst thing you can do.<p>Look at WW2 Germany. Sure, we got rid of Hitler, but in order to prevent Germany from blowing up again (exactly what had happened after WW1) the Allies actually had to work out long-term plans for the occupation of Germany to make sure the citizens were educated enough to understand how messed up their world view used to be and that the country was re-integrated into world economy and politics.<p>We need a Marshall Plan for Syria with buy-in from several major influencers. THEN we can talk about disposing of Assad.