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| Ambassador Ford |
On
the day President Barack Obama won his second term, American diplomats told
participants in the Syrian opposition “jamboree” in Doha there would be no
change in the Obama policy of refusing to intervene militarily or arm the
resistance.
Instead,
they said, Washington would seek a “political solution” to the carnage in
Syria.
The
American diplomats were named as U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and A.
Elizabeth Jones, a former Assistant Secretary for European
and Eurasian Affairs and one-time U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of
Kazakhstan.
Samir
Nashar, one of the Syrian National Council (SNC) members who attended the meeting
with Ford and Jones tells today’s edition of the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat,
“They plainly said the United States does not envisage a solution in Syria
other than the political solution.”
Nashar
added, “When we told the two diplomats such an American position will ruin the
reputation of the United States among Syrians, their answer was: ‘You need to
relay this to the Syrians in dozes – that the United States won’t intervene in
Syria and they have no choice other than a political solution.’
 |
| Elizabeth Jones |
“…We
reiterated that -- despite (U.S.) criticisms of the SNC – we remain committed
first and foremost to the Syrian revolution’s path and objectives, which
foreclose any political solution that does not commence with Bashar al-Assad
standing down.”
Political
analyst Rajeh
el-Khoury, writing for the independent Lebanese daily an-Nahar, describes
Obama 2 as just “a carbon copy” of Obama 1.
“Barack
Obama is back and nothing will change. We have a carbon copy of the U.S.
president who will probably be less interested in foreign policy issues in
order to focus during his second term on what James A. Baker calls America’s
Titanic load of debt,” Khoury says.
“Look
at Obama’s wavering and elusive policies vis-à-vis (1) the Libyan revolution
(2) change in Egypt, which is now causing Washington a splitting headache, and
(3) the revolution in Syria, where massacres and calamities multiply because of
Russia’s malign alignment with the regime and America turning a blind eye to
the bloodbath and cruelly denying arms to regime opponents. If we pondered all
this, we would conclude that Obama 2 could only be like Obama 1… So don’t
expect U.S. policy change. You won’t see it anytime soon.”
Zuhair Qusaybati, writing
for the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, notes that many regional states and
politicians are pinning false hopes on Obama’s second term. Some see him arming
the Syrian opposition adequately to overthrow the regime by year’s end, or
warning to cut aid to Israel if it did not stop the building of settlements and
the judaization of Jerusalem, or inviting Ali Khamenei to the White House to
end the tug-of-war over Iran’s nuclear file and share spheres of influence in
the ‘Shiite Crescent’ region.”
All
this is wishful thinking, says Qusaybati, because the Obama administration’s
“pullout from the region will from here on enter its second stage. So there is
no good news on the way for the Syrians. Chances of the U.S. arming the
opposition are low and the likelihood of military intervention is nil. Syria is
abandoned to its fate. The balance of power will be decided on the ground -- at
a prohibitive cost…”
