At first glance, the Syrian peace talks seem condemned to failure because of the apparently irreconcilable positions stated heatedly today at Montreux, Switzerland. US Secretary of State John Kerry clashed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov while the Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem brushed aside the US-backed Syrian opposition as terrorists.
Both Moallem and Lavrov rejected American, Saudi and Turkish insistence that Syrian President Bashar al Assad must be deposed as part of a peace process to install a new transition government. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who chaired the conference, looked powerless when he was unable to stop Moallem from accusing almost everyone at the conference of backing “terrorists” in Syria.
The foreign policy triumph that President Barack Obama sought by pressuring Russia to bring its Syrian government clients to Montreux got off to a very weak start. But it is too early to predict failure since this game so critical for Syria’s suffering millions has just begun.
Kerry and Obama’s mistake was to succumb to Saudi and Israeli pressure to force Ban to withdraw his invitation to Iran to take part in the talks. Their argument was that Teheran does not accept that Assad must go. By that criterion, Russia should also have been disinvited because it will not allow Assad to be deposed as part of the US-led peace process.
Lavrov again insisted at Montreux that only the Syrian people should decide who heads a new government. Moscow argues that the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have no authority to depose a foreign head of state through diplomacy, whatever their opinions about his legitimacy.
Such chasms may look unbridgeable but they are not. The positive outcome is that a first dialogue has begun with the Syrian government in a diplomatic peace talks setting. It leaves space for a later entry for Iran into the peace process alongside its opponents Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which like Teheran are arming proxies inside Syria.
Yet, it would be misplaced to expect a united Syria to emerge from this process. A realistic expectation might be a start to lesser violence and an eventual end game establishing a new fragmented Syria divided between Assad’s rump regime and areas controlled by rebels.
This may not satisfy Obama’s best hopes but would end the civil wars. In that limited sense, it would vindicate Kerry’s energetic diplomacy to cap the Syrian people’s suffering.
One reason is that Moallem may have come to Montreux only to squeeze acquiescence from Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, for non-interference in the Aleppo, which is Syria’s largest city. Talks between the two sides start in Geneva on Friday.
In Aleppo, Jarba’s US-backed coalition has suffered serious setbacks at the hands of Islamist militants linked either to a Saudi-backed Islamist front or al Qaeda-backed fighters. Syrian state television today showed pictures of a civil aircraft landing at Aleppo’s airport to demonstrate that government troops have wrested substantial control over the city from the rebels. This has happened partly because the rebels are fighting among themselves for leadership over the rebellion against Assad.
Assad’s forces have been gaining the upper hand on the ground recently and control the country’s best areas including Damascus, Homs, Hama and the highways to the Mediterranean coast. The Sunni rebels, whether the Saudi-backed radicals or al-Qaeda extremists, control the poorer Sunni provinces of northern and eastern Syria. However, the rebels have not be able to overrun Assad’s military bases even in those areas.
The al-Qaeda and other extremist Sunni fighters have shunned Montreux and are staying out of the Geneva process. Jarba’s coalition, which is the weakest rebel group with leaders living in exile outside Syria, will be present in Geneva on Friday but it is unclear whether face-to-face meetings will occur with the government delegation.
If Jarba’s delegation meets face-to-face with the government, it might lose all credibility with the hardline fighters, who are already trying to obtain military victory over the armed wings of his coalition.
Against this backdrop, the only way to force a peace deal upon the belligerents would be for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to recognize that Iran and its proxies cannot be defeated militarily in Syria. They cannot obtain victory unless the US enters the war directly by enforcing no-fly zones to neutralize Assad’s warplanes while destroying his tanks from the air.
To prevent Syria’s fragmentation after a no-fly zone, Turkish or other soldiers may have to enter Syria to get rid of both Assad and the al-Qaeda extremists, who strike fear even in Saudi Arabia. There, they might encounter Teheran’s Special Forces already inside that country, thus causing unpredictable devastation and mayhem in Syria.
That would surely upset American voters and could seriously hurt Obama or his successor. So all sides might have to let Iran enter the Geneva peace process on par with Saudi Arabia to find a political solution before the war becomes worse. However unpleasant, Iran is the indispensable nation in the Syria wars.