Cairo high spots Assad’s déjà vu

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Assad in his interview and Putin in his hang glider next to a Siberian white crane

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has rehashed his lines.

He tells Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram al-Arabi in an interview appearing in full tomorrow, Saturday:

• The terrorists won’t win, but defeating them will take time
• The Libyan scenario won’t be repeated in Syria
• Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nouveaux riche and the West’s surrogates
• Qatar was the quickest to fuel violence in Syria
• Saudi Arabia was behind Israel’s 1967 war on Egypt and does not appreciate the present Axis of Resistance against Zionism
• Turkey is now guided by neo-Ottomanism
• A triumvirate of Iraq-Syria-Egypt is the master key to Middle East stability

There is little else interesting or newsworthy in the excerpts from the interview with Assad posted on the magazine’s website.

What is intriguing though are the motives of a publication partly-owned by the Egyptian government for giving Assad a platform to attack the Syrian revolution and its leading regional backers.

It’s akin to a periodical in Washington choosing to interview Pol Pot when his gang was taking Cambodian lives during the mid-seventies.

Editorially, ingenious author and political analyst Samir Atallah writes in his daily column for Saudi Asharq Alawsat:

The latest statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry last Tuesday called for a return to the Geneva communiqué of the Action Group for Syria (AGS).

The said Geneva conference is where UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed raised a question that got no reply, “Where’s Kofi Annan?”

Kofi was in Tehran listening carefully to Iran’s love of peace and harmony in Syria and the region, and especially in Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf.

There’s something odd on the international stage concerning Syria. There are disparate languages and a monotonous tone. America is similar to Russia. Moscow repeats that the Syrian president need not stay in power. Washington has been reciting for a year that he is on his way out. Lakhdar Brahimi is meanwhile saying what Kofi Annan said.

In their opinion, Bashar al-Assad is restating his love of the homeland, the nation and steadfastness and that Syria has no problem other than countries arming terrorist gangs.

Everyone behaves as if the innocent people being killed every day were Siberian white cranes, the sort of endangered birds Vladimir Putin is trying to save from extinction.

The world is full of travesties. The most insolent of them is to see a world leader taking to the sky in a motorized hang glider while his warplanes were bombing Aleppo, raising the number of Syrian fatalities above 30,000.

The comportment of all sides vis-à-vis Syrians has been dull and repetitious in many languages.

Hillary Clinton did not offer Syrians more than Sergei Lavrov, who recently ceased his daily barbs, ordering his subordinates to do the talking instead.

One state used the veto and another followed in its suit. The pair crippled the Arab League and UN Security Council and agreed on doing nothing more than audit the daily numbers of killings in Syria.

In truth, both principals realize there’s no solution. All conferences and communiqués will lead to nothing other than what we see: carnage from the air, shrieks of death on the ground, tents awaiting refugees and storms, and the anticipation of Assad’s next verbiage and his dialogue with the opposition he cloned.

Syria: Extra year of Annan as global zookeeper

My first reaction on hearing Kofi Annan’s press briefing after Saturday’s meeting of the “Action Group on Syria” was that the UN-Arab League special envoy to Syria has just given himself a one-year job as “Syria traffic warden.”

Writing in a somewhat similar sarcastic vein, George Semaan, a former editor-in-chief of pan-Arab al-Hayat, today suggests “Annan’s mission will be kept alive so long as there remains living souls in Syria.”

What was required of the Action Group meeting, he writes, “was to avoid pronouncing the mission dead. Hence the escape forward and a pseudo-agreement on a declamation that was ambiguous in its wording but clear in its spirit.

“The aim was to allow all participants – except the Syrians of course -- to interpret the declamation whimsically to match their avowed positions and respective links with the protagonists.”

Semaan says, “Annan’s mission is no longer tied to a timetable. His mandate won’t be ending in mid-month. The new plan gives him a year or more to go through the roadmap and the transition…

“The deliberate ambiguity in the declamation gives a leeway to all the sides. In particular, it gives Russia and the United States extra time. The important thing was to keep the political option as the only one on the table…

“The policies of ‘gaining time’ and ‘constructive ambiguity’ allowed the major players to reach an understanding in Geneva.

“But the Syrian sides’ positions can’t afford further ‘destructive clarity.’ Neither is President Assad’s ‘eclipse’ within reach nor can his adversaries sit down with his puppets. The revolution was meant to throw him out, so how can (insurrectionists) now risk uplifting him and his regime? It’s probably too late to envisage a solution like in Egypt or Yemen…”

In the opinion of Egyptian talk show host and columnist Imad Adeeb, “Short of an under-the-counter deal between all the delegations and the one from Russia, the outcome of the (Geneva) meeting is ‘inconsequential’ and ‘vague.’ Like water, it has no taste, color or odor but simply boosts killings and massacres…

“Washington has no preoccupation other than the presidential elections in November… the European Union is licking its wounds and laden with the debts of Greece and Spain… Beijing and Moscow are meantime playing the role of a skilled opportunist waiting for the right time to sacrifice the Assad regime in return for winning international guarantees that its replacement in Damascus would safeguard his interests.”

Fascinatingly, remarks Adeeb, the Geneva meeting’s closing statement “is equivocal. The Syrian opposition sees it as politically catastrophic and a license for prolonging killings and massacres. The UN perceives it as a positive step. Mrs. Clinton claims it clearly outlines the shape of the post-Assad regime. The Assad regime feels, without explicitly admitting, it won a minimum six-month extension to its political life.”

Asking, “Now what?” in his leader today, Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, writes: “The answer is simple – there is no political solution on the horizon…

“The Geneva conference is not the be-all and end-all of the crisis. It is not a loss for the Syrian revolution. It is proof that what the revolutionaries do on the ground is what makes the difference. Consequently, it is imperative to deem the Geneva conference a non-event and continue arming the Syrian opposition...”

Mulling over “an extra year for Annan,” brilliant Lebanese writer and columnist Samir Atallah writes:

“Annan’s (success) chances are still below 10 percent. They shot so high because the polar Bear decided to send Sergei Lavrov to Geneva with a ‘yes’ shackled by a thousand conditions. China in turn chose to doze off on her pillow.

“Who knows? Maybe 20,000 deaths would budge the Bear or stir the Dragon… Maybe I hastened as well to give vent to my feelings and criticize the man whose friends call ‘Kofi.’

“Problem is tragic events have left the world numb. It’s a world of Bears, Dragons and Elephants who do not want to upset the Lion (Arabic for Assad).”