Syria’s Surreal Fake Peace Process

Staffan de Mistura has a strange job. The United Nations is paying him to organize peace talks in Geneva that he knows perfectly well aren’t going anywhere.

“Nothing substantial” will result from the talks Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said last week. They are just for show, “merely a meeting for the media.”

Of course they are. Even journalists who cover Syria for a living are hardly paying attention, and not just because the general public isn’t interested. We aren’t interested either. The only newsworthy item here is that one of the parties can admit the whole thing is a charade and yet it continues.  

Peace talks work when both sides are tired of fighting and would rather end a war than win it. That isn’t ever likely to happen in Syria. On one side is a sectarian non-Muslim Alawite regime that rightly fears it will be genocided off the face of the earth if it’s ever defeated by the likes of the Al Qaeda and the Nusra Front. On the other side is a hodgepodge of Sunni Muslim militias, most of them Islamist, and they too rightly fear they will be liquidated if the “heretical” mass-murdering totalitarian regime has its way.

What could the two sides possibly ever negotiate? Power-sharing? Impossible. A transition to free and fair elections? Neither side would ever win a proper election and they both know it.

The Assad clan is not stepping aside. Anyone who wants him out of his palace is going to have to shoot him out of his palace. The entire world by now should know enough about Al Qaeda and similar terrorist armies like ISIS and the Taliban that they don’t compromise either. None of these people resemble in any way whatsoever former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat or King Hussein of Jordan who signed peace treaties with Israel.

Syrian peace talks are no more real than Syrian elections, where Assad “won” 99.7 percent of the “vote” in the year 2000. If the Western world were as autocratic as the Middle East and Russia, the Syrians wouldn’t even bother with fake elections or fake peace talks. They’re doing this entirely to make an impression on gullible Westerners. Judging by the near-total dearth of press coverage or confidence that anything remotely productive will ever result from the theater in Geneva, they’re wasting their time. The only people in the West who are actually interested in any of this are those who are paid to show up.

Italian diplomat Staffan de Mistura is going through the motions, though, and he might even be sincere. He says there can be no resolution to the Syrian war with some kind of political settlement. Actually, there can be. The war will end the way almost every other war in history has ended—when one side wins and the other side loses.

It’s also entirely possible—and inevitable in the long-run—that both sides will lose. No totalitarian army or regime in history has lasted forever. Rather than pointlessly cajoling the Middle East’s Hitlers and Stalins to lay down their weapons and make peace with each other and with their neighbors, those of us who are actually concerned about Syria, for the sake of our own well-being as well as for Syria’s, should concentrate instead on ensuring that neither side has a future.