James Clapper: “President Assad, he said, will not step down or stop the killing, short of a coup.”

Ties with Tehran offer some regional governments a means of staking an independent position on Iran, thereby mitigating its isolation while also attempting to extract Iranian financial aid and investment for economic and social projects.

I think this reflects Russian insecurity. And it's almost like, Putin needs a rhetorical security blanket, of making threats, like this.

I've gotten very concerned about it. There are Chinese, Russians and others so we traditionally thought about it as people coming from Central America, South and Central America. Well, it's much broader than that. So this is a serious…

I think the reason they were taken off the list was to provide an inducement or motivation for them to agree to some sort of ceasefire.