The joint proposal by America and Russia for peace talks to resolve the civil war in Syria offers a glimmer of hope, but little more than that.
Terms of the discussions still have to be firmed up. Both the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and elements of the opposition have said they are interested in the idea of talks, but not much more. Assad has previously refused any notion that he should step down, or step aside while negotiations are in progress.
Meanwhile, the fighting has worsened, with reports of a massacre near the Lebanese border around the town of Qusayr by militants of the Shia Hezbollah group, in which 30 villagers are believed to have been murdered.
Talks such as those proposed can be extremely tortuous, and in the case of Syria almost no framework of diplomacy can now embrace all the fighting parties. Remember, talks about ending the Vietnam war opened in 1968 — and matters were only concluded seven years later with the fall of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh’s forces and the Viet Cong.
News of the proposed Syria talks broke against a tide of demands from a string of commentators and diplomats in the US calling for intervention. Once a dirty word in the chanceries of Europe following the debacle of Iraq, intervention is now being mentioned again.
There are worries about the fragile state of Jordan, under severe pressure from the flow of refugees from Syria, and increasing volatility across the region of the Eastern Mediterranean. The two heavy Israeli air strikes last weekend, against military storage facilities that were possibly about to ship missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon, could be the beginnings of a gunpowder trail that might lead to confrontation with Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor and ally.
But what could any intervention achieve? Some commentators in the liberal New York Times have even spoken of a full-scale occupation — an impossible task given the political, ethnic, and religious complexity of the peoples of Syria. Surely we have learned enough about the limitations of outside interference and occupation from the past 10 or 12 years in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Once again we’ll be invited to heed such tired old clichés as Colin Powell’s remark about Iraq: that once you break a thing, you own it. In the case of Syria this is nonsense. No one is capable now of owning fully the Syrian crisis, let alone controlling it.
