While Assad was gloating during the beginning of Egypts Tahrir square movement saying his policies were "with the hearts of the people" there were two camps:

1. Assad is popular and represents one of the few bastions of anti-imperialism...
2. Assad is a corrupt autocrat whose Syria has all the problems that led to the revolt in Egypt.

Group one and two agree on the nature of Egypts revolt but already didn't see eye to eye on Syria.  While group 2 realized that the corruption of Mubarak and Bin Ali were at LEAST as bad as Assad's, group 1 saw only that Syria was "unlikely to revolt" because in the end... Syria was opposed to America... and while many of the intelectuals were loath to say it... they believed what Iran was saying: that the Arab Spring was a response to Western imperialism and Israel... and not Arab autocratic rule itself...

Then Libya came... followed by Syria... not exactly examples of pro-western dictators.

But let us compare further:

Egypt has roughly 80 million and had around 2 million (unconfirmed) protesters present at the height of the movement... Syria has at times had as many as 600,000 (unconfirmed) at the height of their movement...

While the Egyptian movement strengthened with little violence on the scale of what we see now in Syria... the Syrian movement was a long time brewing.  Egyptians went to the street when they realized nothing was happening... but Syrians went to the street... initially in opposition to what was happening.  The people of Dera'a didn't demand the fall of the regime, but simply the release of 17 children who spray painted Arab spring slogans on the wall...

The people of other cities started protesting in spite of Assad's brutal crackdown on Dera'a and in opposition to it.

My question to the peanut gallery:

What reasons can you give to justify the idea that the revolt in Syria is not a popular movement like the one in Egypt and Tunis.