Russia, U.S. and “Friends” get SNC slap in the face

The Syrian National Coalition, the country’s opposition umbrella group, has finally given Russia, the United States and the so-called “Friends of Syria” group a kick in the teeth.

The Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces said it was turning down invitations to visit Moscow and Washington and suspending participation in the “Friends of Syria” conference due in Rome next month.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page late Friday night, the National Coalition described the deathlike “silence of the international community over daily crimes committed against our people” as “complicity in the slaughter of Syrians throughout the past two years.”

The statement said, “Hundreds of defenseless civilians are being killed by Scud missiles.

“Aleppo, the city of history and civilization, is being systematically destroyed.

“Add to this millions of refugees and displaced and hundreds of thousands of detainees, wounded and orphans.

"In protest against such shameless international stance, the coalition leadership decided to suspend its participation in the ‘Friends of Syria’ conference in Rome and to turn down invitations to visit Russia and the United States.

“We hold the Russian leadership ethically and politically responsible for the most part because they continue to back the (Damascus) regime with arms.

“We also urge people around the world to regard the week of March 15-22, which marks the Syrian revolution’s second anniversary, as a week of mourning and protest.”

Kuwait’s Muslim scholar Dr. Ghazi al-Tawbah, writing for Aljazeera.net last week, wondered if “Friends of Syria” conferences were not in reality meetings of “enemies.”

The Syrian opposition, he said, has been telling its “friends” for two years -- at successive meetings in Tunis, Istanbul, Paris and Marrakesh -- what it needs to protect the Syrian people.

All the Syrian opposition got in return was “hollow promises.”

Dr. Tawbah wrote, “Opposition leaders told their hosts opposition forces needed some qualitative weapons to face tanks and warplanes. They said setting up an interim government needed safe zones and a budget of $500 million to meet the Syrian people’s needs. They explained the Syrian people suffered 60,000 fatalities, 140,000 wounded, 60,000 disappeared, 140,000 detainees, 720,000 refugees, two million displaced and four million in need of humanitarian aid.”

The “friends” having offered zilch, “we are justified to ask: Were these ‘Friends of Syria’ conferences in the past two years meant to be meetings with the friends or enemies of Syria?”

Friends, Dr. Tawbah opined, “are supposed to answer their friends’ pleas. But why is that not so with Syria of all the Arab Spring countries?”

Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s analyst, author and kingpin of the impending Al Arab TV news channel writing today for pan-Arab al-Hayat, says, “Raising funds nowadays is tough, given the global economic slowdown.

“At the (January 30) Kuwait conference, the United Nations sought to raise $1,2 billion in humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Since then, it received not more than 20% of the pledges made.

“So who is going to come up with the billions needed to rebuild Syria?

“Even if Bashar (al-Assad) were to succeed in putting down his people’s revolution, the region’s states and leaders won’t rehabilitate him or return him to their fold. Nor will they bear the cost of seeing him survive without victory or defeat.

“Accordingly, it is time to focus on the benefits of seeing him out and the establishment of a friendly, democratic and popular regime. All regional countries will draw benefit from this happening, except Iran.

“If truth were told though, losing Syria is better for Iran long-term. Losing Syria would bring Iran down to reality instead of continuing to live its pipedream of reversing 1,400 years of history. Iran would revert to its regional size, concentrating on its people’s wellbeing.”

With Assad’s exit, Khashoggi continues, “Jordan would be relieved of its northern neighbor’s plots and resultant security and intelligence costs. It would have a neighborly country complementing its economy and agriculture. Jordan and the new Syria would connect with Lebanon in a Bilad al-Sham economic triumvirate without border or regime change.

“Saudi Arabia would also be relieved of security strains the Baathist regime posed on and off in Lebanon or in connivance with Iran – this, without Saudi Arabia being able to isolate, or dissociate from, Syria.

“After all, Syria represents Saudi Arabia’s strategic and economic expanse and its doorway to Turkey and Europe.

“A free, democratic Syria with a market economy would certainly be good news for Saudi Arabia.”

Khashoggi says if Turkey and the Arabs choose to boost their support of the Syrian people, they could induce U.S. President Barack Obama not to wait any longer and to put his weight behind the Syrian revolution independently of the UN Security Council.

“Precedents of ‘Special Operations’ behind the Security Council’s back are many,” Khashoggi remarks.

U.S., after Russia, is part of the problem in Syria

The Assads entertaining the Kerrys at dinner in a Damascus restaurant (File photo from syrianhistory.com)

Abdelwahhab Badrakhan, who holds a Master’s degree in Information Science from the Sorbonne, writes regularly for four regional newspapers and has a daily political analysis program on Radio Monte Carlo Doualiya (International). He wrote this think piece in Arabic for today’s al-Hayat

Russia’s position on Syria became hopeless months ago. Instead of evolving, its position became increasingly intransigent.

All the talk about Moscow being “unconcerned” about Bashar al-Assad’s fate was a smokescreen.

It was meant to conceal the reality that Moscow joins Iran in considering Assad a “red line.” Russia and Iran work hand in glove in arming the regime and mapping out its survival, pending a solution tailored to fit it.

To see the United States join the Russian-Iranian duet is no longer far-fetched.

Why? Because the Syria crisis now has a byname in Washington: “Jabhat al-Nusra” or the “War on Terror,” instead of “The people want an end to oppression and aspire to freedom.”

The massacre of hostages and hostage-takers in Algeria, the mixture of Afghanization and Somalization with a tint of al-Qaeda in northern Mali, and al-Qaeda’s role in the killing of the U.S. ambassador and two other American diplomats in Benghazi will certainly spur America’s belief that “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

When John Kerry, the new U.S. secretary of state and old “friend” of the Syrian regime, meets his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov next month, the new Obama Administration’s foreign policy wouldn’t have jelled yet. But the new policy will be drawing nearer – not further from – Russia’s objectives. It will want to activate the Syria “understandings.”

You can forget Washington’s earlier blabber about “a transitional government with full powers” and the need for Assad to step down.

The two big powers will support whoever can stifle terror. They will stand shoulder to shoulder against any side impeding this priority.

Obviously, they will want to rely on the regime, which is far from being gullible. The regime will request U.S. guarantees for its survival.

The regime is aware, but has yet to acknowledge, that the Americans have already dried up the sources of financial and military assistance to the opposition, including the non-extremist side. But the regime would also request the resumption of ties with Washington and a visit by old friend “Kerry,” who would have by then forgotten his earlier counsel to Assad to step down.

Meantime, the regime is trying hard to prove its mettle by committing at least a daily massacre, and by targeting children, young men and a whole generation…

That’s what you call the “Game of Nations” and the amorality of power politics in its ugliest form.

Once American and Russian pragmatism converge and play ball with the brutal Assad regime, Syria can expect a muddier and more tempestuous chapter.

The “game of nations’ leaves no room for peoples’ rights and “aspirations.” The Palestinian people can attest to such historic injustice.

At best, the Syrian opposition will be cornered and told the balance of power leaves it no more than what the two great powers determined.

The Syrian people demanded the protection of civilians. They demanded a no-fly zone. They demanded qualitative weapons to redress the balance of forces. They demanded relief aid. They demanded that children not be left to die from cold or disease.

They got nothing from the international community. Whoever spoke of a “conspiracy” with the regime against the people was not far from the truth.

Of course, America’s turnaround was not, and will not, be by electric shock. Nor will it be an easy matter, free of hurdles.

Despite differences in their assessments, neither Washington nor Moscow are certain the regime can still be rehabilitated – albeit for the specific, camouflaged and seemingly-worthy task of “precluding the collapse of the state and the army.”

But the “game of nations” hardly ever yields peaceable balances…

As the Americans and Russians play up today the symptoms of Somalization in Syria, they are fully aware the regime created them.  In addition, Barack Obama’s “non-intervention doctrine” effectively produced the same fallouts in Syria as those of the “intervention doctrine” of George W. Bush in Iraq.

Russia, which justifies its intervention in Syria with a lesson in international law, gives a bad example of what the international community’s role should be. Indeed, the two powers would say anything to absolve them of any responsibility for creating the situation they now bemoan. They make it sound as though the Syrian people revolted, sacrificed and suffered simply to stack up al-Qaeda and other terrorists on their soil.

By encapsulating the crisis as a proliferation of extremism, and by mulling a plausible excuse for its about-face, the United States is prioritizing the side effects of the illness instead of treating its causes. It even seems prepared to overlook the violence, the bloodshed and the destruction meted out by the regime -- to the point of pondering reliance on the regime “to restore order.”

Why and how Washington’s U-turn?

The factors are threefold:

1. From the onset, Washington’s priority in addressing the Syria crisis was to protect Israel’s interests, which meant “reforming the regime” rather than “regime change.”

2. The obduracy of Russia, which exploited Syria’s plight to recover its “Great Power” status, thereby forcing the Obama administration to reluctantly choose between outright confrontation and a trade-off.

3. The Syrian opposition’s struggle to set up one or more viable alternatives to the regime, chiefly because of the [two Assads’] 42-year bulldozing of politics altogether…

The Americans have long been heard inviting the Russians to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Here is America becoming part of the problem too.

Should the anticipated policy change come true, America, like Russia, would become responsible for the Syrians’ killing and the butchery of their revolution.