On Wednesday, the American secretary of state, John Kerry, met with the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in Geneva.
De Mistura must have been happy to hear Kerry praise his efforts and that Washington hoped the Russian peace plan for Syria “could be helpful.”
However, the experienced diplomat probably listened more intently to another thing Kerry said.
“It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” the secretary of state remarked.
Media outlets immediately noticed that Kerry had made no explicit mention of the need for Assad to leave office, long the position of the Obama administration. Instead, he stepped back and resorted to that tiresome American habit of appealing to the reasonable in foreign officials — as if the man responsible for the carnage in Syria had any interest in “putting his people first.”
Last week Tony Badran speculated that Washington’s “stated priorities in Syria align it increasingly with Russia and Iran.” If so, Kerry’s statement in Geneva seems to be further evidence of this. But one is tempted to go further and speculate about the implications with respect to de Mistura’s mission.
As President Barack Obama made clear last October in a letter addressed to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the airstrikes directed by the international coalition against ISIS in Syria would not target Bashar Assad’s forces. In other words, Obama implicitly admitted that the United States recognized Iranian interests in Syria and would not seek to undermine them.
In this context, the Russian plan for Syria, along with Iran’s reported refusal to consider Assad’s removal, is not designed to find a consensual solution. The aim is to take advantage of the global preoccupation with terrorism to consolidate the Syrian president’s hold on power.
Neither Moscow nor Tehran may be enamored of Assad, but with no clear alternative to preserve their interests, they will stick with him for as long as they need to.
It seems that Washington is now also beginning to shift on Assad. It may have no intention of endorsing the president, but it is definitely reshaping its rhetoric to show that it will not push for his removal or encourage regional countries to do so.
America’s differences with Turkey over Syria, for instance, have been profound. Ankara’s ambiguous relationship with ISIS, like the fact that a suspect in the Paris attacks last week fled to Syria via Turkey, can only widen the American-Turkish divide.
De Mistura must be watching all this closely, as it will affect the way he formulates his own plan for resolving the Syrian conflict. Until now the UN envoy has strayed away from a discussion of Assad’s fate, knowing it could scuttle his efforts.
But if he begins to see that America, Russia and Iran, all key actors in Syria, do not view Assad’s exit as necessary, or even desirable, his proposals on some sort of transitional governing structure for the country could end up being more favorable to the Syrian regime.
But de Mistura also knows that Assad’s rising confidence will have a bearing on his own proposal for a ceasefire in Aleppo. The stronger the Syrian regime feels, the less flexible it will be on the ground. With the situation so fluid in Syria’s second largest city, the UN envoy’s scheme remains a long shot.
A Lebanese politician offered an interesting take on the Syrian situation, arguing that an eventual alternative to Bashar Assad may be his brother Maher. At first glance the proposal sounds ludicrous. If any individual is regarded as more responsible for the regime’s brutality in Syria than Bashar, it is Maher. That the opposition can never possibly accept him seems self-evident.
Indeed, but the Syrian opposition with whom the West wants to deal is largely marginalized today. And no one really much cares what the jihadists think, since they are uninterested in any solution short of an outright military victory over the regime.
What Maher would supposedly offer is reassurance to the Alawites, Iran and Russia. Bashar’s departure could also serve as victory enough for the opposition to split, with some factions entering into a dialogue to end the fighting.
It’s not terribly convincing as a scenario, but with Bashar’s opponents divided and Iran, Russia and the United States adamant about his survival or equivocal about his departure, these attitudes may open the door to outcomes nobody imagined were possible.
It’s a pity that the Obama administration, rather than regard the Assad regime as contributing to and complicit in the extremism generated by the Syrian war, sees it as more palatable than the alternatives.
It takes enormous self-delusion not to grasp that Assad has attracted the jihadists like a magnet or to imagine that Russia can devise an acceptable path out of the Syrian mess that all will accept.
American self-delusion is really the outcome of indifference. As the Paris attacks showed, no one is truly safe when a conflict like the one in Syria is allowed to spin out of control. The world is even less safe when Washington refuses to see the obvious.
Michael Young is opinion editor of The Daily Star newspaper. He tweets @BeirutCalling
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