French President François Hollande has just eaten his words on arming the Syrian
opposition.
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| Hollande and Syrian coalition leader M. al-Khatib |
He said overnight he was unsure if weapons supplied
to opposition rebels would not fall into the hands of jihadists.
At
the European Union summit in Brussels two weeks ago, Hollande and British Prime
Minister David Cameron were both pressing for the relaxation of an arms embargo
on Syria so that arms can
flow to outgunned rebels fighting regime forces loyal to Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad.
The
embargo expires on June 1 and both leaders said it should be allowed to lapse.
Speaking
in Brussels on March 15, the French president said he had received guarantees
from the Syrian opposition that any future arms delivered to them will end up
in the right hands.
“In
terms of delivering weapons … to have the best answer the opposition must give
all necessary guarantees. It's because we have been given those that we can
envisage the lifting of the embargo. We have the certainty on the use of these
weapons,” he said two weeks ago.
But
Hollande backpedaled in his Thursday
night interview on France 2 television, telling anchorman David Pujadas: “There
is today an embargo, and we respect it. The Russians violate the embargo, and
that’s a problem.
“In the past two years, almost 100,000 people were
killed in Syria – 100,000. There’s a radicalizing civil war and jihadists are
seizing the opportunity to batter Bashar and accumulate credit points for the
future.
“No arms can be delivered when the embargo lapses,
which is end-May, if we cannot ascertain that such weapons will be used by
legitimate (regime) opponents only and held back from any terrorist enterprise.
“For the moment, we don’t have that guarantee. We
won’t do it (deliver weapons) so long as there is no certainty
the opposition controls the situation.”
Muhammad
Ballout, writing today for the pro-Assad Beirut daily as-Safir, says Hollande’s remarks last night are “light years away”
from his statement two weeks before in Brussels.
Ballout
attributes the French president’s change of heart on arming the Syrian
opposition to news that many weapons supplied to rebels in Libya have since turned
up in the fighting in Mali.
Another
reason cited by Ballout is a report in the French satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné
quoting French Minister Laurent Fabius as telling a council of ministers
meeting, “We have to be extra cautious before arming the Syrian opposition
because (the head of Syria’s interim government) Ghassan Hitto is close to the
Muslim Brotherhood.”
So
it looks like Hollande subscribing to Barack Obama’s “paralyzing caution” on
Syria.
Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “The Syrian Rebellion”
and other books, yesterday described “How
Obama is Failing Syria” in a think piece for Bloomberg, writing in part:
In
the matter of the Syrian rebellion, the U.S. hasn’t even “led from behind.” The
Obama administration has pioneered a new role for a great power: We are now the
traffic controllers, directing the flow of weapons to the rebels.
The
money isn’t ours; it is Qatari and Saudi and Libyan. The planes hauling the
weapons are Jordanian, Qatari and Saudi. And Syria’s neighbors, principally
Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, run the risks.
Our
officials have opinions on Syria, but no one in the Greater Middle East can
divine them. We want Bashar al-Assad gone -- our president said so in August
2011 -- a full five months into a brutal war. Then again, through winks and
nods, we suggest that the alternative to Assad might be worse than his
despotism.
No
sooner do we make one definitive statement against the dictator than we hedge
it with an invitation to both the dictatorship and the opposition to come to
the negotiating table. Great crimes are committed by the Syrian regime, but we
are full of worries about the jihadists who have converged on that country. For
American officials, the lengths of the fighters’ beards, one Syrian opposition
leader lamented,
are more important than the massacres.
Barack
Obama is a cool, cerebral man. It is his defining image. History won’t rush him
or force his hand. If George W. Bush was the “decider,” his successor is the
questioner who “wrestles” with decisions…
