Now that he’s won, after putting Syria on hold throughout his reelection
campaign, U.S. President Barack Obama seems set to bungle the Syrian
Revolution.
Instead of arming Syrian opposition rebels to topple President Bashar
al-Assad, his administration is now hard-selling Russia’s roadmap for a Syrian-led
political settlement.
The opening shots in the U.S.-Russian common approach to the Syria crisis
came a week before Election Day, when Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton said the Syrian National Council was dysfunctional.
Within days, the State Department was orchestrating the ongoing
hullabaloo in Doha over a Syrian National Initiative (SNI) to replace the SNC
(see my Nov. 3 post, U.S.
push to overhaul Syrian opposition gains pace).
Almost at the same time, Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov flew to Cairo for talks with Arab League chief
Nabil Elaraby and Syria troubleshooter Lakhdar Brahimi.
Lavrov told reporters
at a post-talks press conference, “We decided what to do in Geneva. And it is
incumbent upon us to move forwards on the basis of what was agreed upon in
Geneva. And the players outside the region should coordinate and… in one
direction. And Russia is doing just that. It is trying to execute what was
agreed upon in Geneva.”
A more indicative sign Washington
and Moscow have shaken hands on a Syria deal came yesterday from New York.
Warning Syria’s current
path of violence will lead the country “to its destruction,” UN Undersecretary-General
for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman -- who until last June was U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State -- said there was an urgent need to “shift away” from the
military logic driving the conflict and to move towards a political process.
“It has to be a
Syrian-led process; it can’t be imposed,” Feltman told reporters at UN
Headquarters in New York after he briefed a closed meeting of the UN Security
Council on the situation in the war-ravaged country.
“It must bring real
change and a clean break from the past,” he added.
With that goal in mind,
Feltman said, Brahimi was working with “great urgency,” mentioning that
Brahimi’s deputy Nasser al-Kidwa was “monitoring” the Syrian opposition restructuring in
Doha.
“The situation inside
Syria is turning grimmer every day,” he told reporters, adding there was a
growing risk the crisis could “explode outward into an already volatile
region.”
“We might, in fact,
already be seeing signs of this spillover,” Feltman said, referring to
Syria-related violence in Turkey and Lebanon, and what he called “activities”
in the Golan.
“We don’t think the
fighting is directed at undermining the disengagement of forces agreement per
se,” Feltman said in response to a question on the situation in Golan. “It is
the Syrian-on-Syrian fighting. But, nevertheless, we are quite concerned about
what the impact could be if there is not an immediate return to full compliance
with that disengagement of forces agreement.”
Feltman flagged how
Brahimi saw a June communiqué by the UN-backed Action Group on Syria as still
providing an “important building block” for an eventual peace.
The Action Group is
made up of the UN and Arab League chiefs; the foreign ministers of the five
permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United
Kingdom and the United States) as well as the Turkish foreign minister; the high
representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy;
and the foreign ministers of Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar, who are members of the Arab
League ministerial committee on Syria.
At a meeting in Geneva last
June 30, the Group had approved the “Geneva Declaration” -- a set of principles
and guidelines for a Syrian-led transition that meets the aspirations of the
Syrian people.
Among other proposed
measures, the Geneva Declaration called on all parties to immediately recommit
to a sustained cessation of armed violence in a bid to end the conflict, in
addition to the establishment of a transitional governing body that would
exercise full executive powers and would be made up of members of the Assad
regime and the opposition and other groups (see full text of the Geneva
Declaration in my June 30 post, Syria
Action Group leaves open Assad question).
