Geneva II Propaganda Campaign

If you are a reader of the New York Times and you are interested in the war being waged in Syria the reporter you have been hearing from is Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard. At almost all times in the stories she writes Barnard sticks to the same cartoon-simple theme as peddled by the U.S. State Department: the war in Syria is entirely the fault of President Bashar al-Assad; he brutally repressed a peaceful democratic uprising, which then morphed into a sectarian region-wide war. Throughout her reporting any role played by the foreign-funded salafi groups -- the main military force fighting the Syrian Arab Army -- is consistently downplayed to the status of a footnote while Lebanon's Hezbollah is played up.

In other words, it is difficult to detect a difference between what Anne Barnard says and what the U.S. State Department says. Is she an employee of the USG? She might as well be.

One place where Barnard did stray off the reservation was in her evolving contempt for the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army. Around the time of the aborted U.S. missile strike following the Ghouta sarin attack, Barnard washed her hands, so to speak, of the opposition in exile.

But no more. If you've been reading Barnard's dispatches from Switzerland, you know that the Syrian rebel group is back in her good graces. Barnard has regularly feted opposition coalition members who are participating in the Geneva II peace talks for their disciplined calm and focused message. At the same time, Barnard mocks the representatives of the Syrian government for their brittleness, mendacity, anger, etc.

Reading Barnard's stories of the last few days, such as "At Neutral Site, Syrians Feel Free to Confront the Other Side" or "After Shaky Beginning, Sides Report Progress at Syria Peace Talks," one sees a skillful propagandist at work.

Take today's offering, "Syrian Opposition’s Calm at Talks Surprises as Officials Falter."

The best that could be achieved coming out of Geneva II from the perspective of the West and its Sheikhdoms is some form of rehabilitation for its proxies in the Syrian National Coalition. The last six months have been rough on the rebels. Public opinion in the West is totally against any involvement. And that is the entire reason that the Syrian National Coalition exists -- to justify Western military intervention a la Libya.

But the public impression in Syria and abroad is that the Western-backed opposition is a group of hired clowns. According to Barnard,

A more immediate goal for the coalition is to increase support within the broader opposition. Some longtime critics of the group say that with Geneva it has begun, in small ways, to repair its image inside Syria as a hapless, hotel-hopping “five-star opposition” that does not represent the people fighting or suffering on the ground. 

“The coalition was able to counter that perception because of their strong stance opposite the weak and sometimes incoherent regime delegation,” said Amal Hanano, a Syrian-American writer who uses a pseudonym to protect family members in Aleppo. “The regime delegation seems unorganized and fractured when that was what people expected from the coalition.”

Barnard dutifully puffs up the coalition. That was the positive part of the propaganda. The negative part was to sow dissension between the Syrian and Russian governments by stating that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was displeased with the conduct of Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem during his opening statement (Moallem's opening statement is the only thing that seems to be discussed in the Western media):

Numerous Western diplomats and opposition delegates said that during the opening speeches last week in Montreux, Switzerland, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, sat with a pained expression and even tapped his watch as Syria’s foreign minister spoke and sparred with the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. 

“We were embarrassed,” said a Russian Foreign Ministry representative who was there. But she played down the significance of the watch tap, saying that perhaps all the Syrians should have had more time to speak.

Barnard also sought to sow dissension in the ranks of Syrian officials by highlighting splits between the Syrian Foreign Ministry and Assad:

Foreign Ministry delegates pledged to discuss a transitional government, only to be contradicted by Mr. Assad’s advisers. Some of the officials’ statements — claiming no knowledge of thousands of prisoners on an opposition list, saying that “terrorists” had carried out all the destruction in Homs, a city that has been bombarded by government airstrikes for two years — were, as Western diplomats put it, more “North Korea” than had been expected at a peace conference, even a largely notional one. 

The reason, diplomats speculated, was that officials were under scrutiny from hard-liners in Damascus and feared retribution should a too-conciliatory phrase slip. It is also possible they assumed the conference would never happen, the Western diplomat said, counting on the opposition to boycott.

Publish rumor and innuendo whispered by a "Western diplomat" and your propaganda mission is complete.

Barnard, thankfully, is like any employee: she chafes at being on the clock and will usually find a way to mention what is really going on. So toward the end of today's piece you will find this gem:

The [Syrian] government also gained some support for its argument that its opponents are Western puppets; opposition delegates met daily with Western diplomats and, Mr. Zoubi said, submitted documents in English, not Arabic. 

But those meetings, where diplomats and a new team of British and American public relations consultants coached opposition members not to rise to the government’s bait, seemed fruitful. 

Louay Safi, an opposition spokesman, was tested when a representative of the state-run SANA news agency asserted that in a government-blockaded area “there are no civilians, only terrorists,” and asked if efforts to get food there aimed to “save the terrorists.” 

“Two good questions, and I thank you for them,” Mr. Safi said, before calmly answering.

In other words, Geneva II is a farce.