When people were being brutalized in Bosnia in the 1990s, Mr. Obama told a national television audience, it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians. It took us 31 days. Yet while the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has brutalized its citizens for more than a year, Mr. Obama now shows no signs of intervening with force, an option his White House sees leading only to 'greater chaos, greater carnage,' as Jay Carney, the press secretary, put it this week. If the president considered Libya a model of humanitarian intervention, Syria increasingly looks like Mr. Obama s Bosnia.

President Obama called on Thursday for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to leave office, and issued a new executive order freezing all Syrian assets within American jurisdiction and barring American citizens from any business dealings with the government.

Barack Obama, the US president, has said Syria's deadly crackdown on protesters "must come to an end now" and accused Damascus of seeking Iranian help to repress its people. Almost 90 protesters were killed on Friday, according to human rights group Amnesty International, in the bloodiest violence in a month of escalating protests against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's rule.

US President Barack Obama has accused Syria of using "outrageous" force against protesters and of seeking Iranian help to quell weeks of unrest. He condemned "in the strongest possible terms" Friday's violence in which more than 70 protesters were killed. He said President Bashar al-Assad refused to respect the rights of protesters, and had instead used the same tactics as his Iranian allies.