After two tries, US Secretary of State John Kerry finally turned President Barack Obama away from his four-year insistence that Bashar Assad must go, as a precondition for a settlement of the Syrian conflict.<br />Tuesday, night, Dec. 15, the Secretary announced in Moscow: “The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change.”<br />After Kerry's first try, Obama still stuck to his guns.<br />He said in Manilla on Nov.19 that he didn’t believe the civil war in Syria “will end while the dictator remains in power.”<br />Almost a month went by and then, Tuesday night, after a day of dickering with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov culminating in a joint conference with Putin at the Kremlin, Kerry confirmed this evolution in US policy.<br />The focus now, he said, is "not on our differences about what can or cannot be done immediately about Assad."<br />Rather, it is on facilitating a peace process in which "Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria."
