Uncle Sam's Absurd Stance on Syria

Colum Lynch has a story, "Kerry presses Syrians to commit to peace talks in first U.N. visit as top U.S. diplomat," about John Kerry's maiden voyage to the United Nations as Secretary of State. After calling on Syria to come to the negotiating table for peace talks Kerry met with the new head of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, Ahmad al-Jarba, whose position remains the same: no peace talks with the Syrian government.

The Syrian opposition, which remains deeply divided, has so far refused to participate in peace talks without an assurance that they would result in Assad’s exit from power. A top Syrian rebel leader, Gen. Salim Idriss, who had been expected to participate in an informal briefing of the Security Council, which is scheduled for Friday morning, canceled his appearance this week. 

The intense focus on a diplomatic outcome signaled continuing U.S. misgivings about the prospect of arming a fragmented opposition, which includes extremists groups linked to al-Qaeda. The military balance of power in the country has recently shifted in favor of government ­forces.

The U.S. position is absurd. It demands peace talks and then sets conditions for those talks that make negotiations impossible: Bashar al-Assad must agree to relinquish power and Iran cannot participate. In actuality the United States has no desire to talk. The Syrian Arab Army is gradually grinding away, accumulating territory. The territory under rebel control is in the Euphrates valley stretching from war-torn Aleppo, where Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) held a Ramadan ice-cream social and tug-of-war, to Iraq and in the Kurdish northeast where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is already at work setting up a government.

In neither area is the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in control. At this point it is merely a front group -- a cut-out, a fiction -- maintained by the United States and its allies among the Gulf sheikdoms. The FSA fiction allows the United States to publicly call for peace while planning and supporting war. At some point down the road, if ISIS does maintain a foothold in Idlib or elsewhere and/or the Kurds are successful at formalizing control in the northeast, a Western intervention can be rationalized as a necessary effort to restore the territorial integrity of the region.