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| Clockwise from top, Iran's Ali Khamenei, Fabius, Lavrov and Kerry |
The United States is
said today to have approved the participation of the Islamic Republic of Iran
in Geneva-2 on Syria.
U.S. Secretary of State
John Kerry will meet his Russian and French counterparts in Paris on Monday
ahead of the expected international conference on Syria.
Kerry and Sergei Lavrov
will meet "to continue discussions from their meeting just a few weeks ago
in Russia, and provide updates as they plan ahead for the international
conference on Syria," a State Department official said in a statement
Friday.
French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius will also take part in what a Western diplomat said would be a
"working dinner" in a restaurant in the French capital.
Russia said on Friday
the Damascus regime had agreed "in principle" to participate in
international talks that have been dubbed Geneva-2.
The first Geneva
meeting, in June 2012, ended in a broad
agreement aimed at forming a transition government in Syria.
But the deal was never
implemented because it left
open the key question of whether President Bashar al-Assad could be part of the
transitional government.
Elie Chalhoub, co-founder
and managing editor of al-Akhbar daily, which is Iran-Assad-Hezbollah’s
mouthpiece in Lebanon, gives
this account of Iran joining Geneva-2:
What
is noteworthy about the Geneva-2 brouhaha is Iran’s insouciant attitude toward
the United States.
Tehran
takes her participation in Geneva-2 with much insouciance after receiving word
from Russia saying: “We’ve been officially notified that the United States has
opted to change its position on Syria.”
Sources
in Tehran say the message to Iranian officials came in a briefing by Lavrov on
his May 7 meeting with Kerry in Moscow.
According
to the note, Kerry told his Russian host: “You have to realize the United
States is not like a motorbike, which can make a full 180-degree turnaround
from a dead stop. The United States being more like a tractor and a trailer, it
can travel through small neighborhoods and narrow streets, perhaps knocking a
few structures and stationary cars on the way. But it ultimately makes the
u-turn.”
Proof
of the message’s authenticity is that the United States has approved Iran’s
participation in Geneva-2.
In her
column today for Beirut’s independent daily an-Nahar, political analyst Rosanna Boumounsef writes in part:
Lebanese
officials have zero hope of Geneva-2 ending the Syria war. They talk from their
familiarity with the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war,
which plunged the country in internal, regional and international conflicts
lasting 15 years. What started as a Christian-Palestinian incident ended as a
Christian-Christian war with Arab, international, Israeli and Iranian players
joining in-between.
Saying
it is a dead duck, the officials compare Geneva-2 on Syria to the fruitless
meetings of Lebanese leaders in Geneva and Lausanne 30 years ago.
(In 1983, a meeting in Geneva of
representatives from the major Lebanese factions for a national dialogue
conference achieved little progress. They were able to agree on only one issue,
the Arab identity of Lebanon. When the representatives reconvened in Lausanne
in 1984, they were unable to make any further progress.)
The
Lebanese civil war did not end before the leaders approved and signed the 1989 Taef Agreement.
Some
of the officials also cite the example of peace talks
to end the Vietnam War.
The
United States and Hanoi agreed to enter into preliminary peace talks in Paris
in 1968. However, almost as soon as the talks were started, they stalled. When
peace talks resumed in Paris on January 8, 1973, an accord was reached swiftly.
The peace agreement was formally signed on January 27, 1973.
