The long-promised, long-delayed peace talks aimed at ending the three-year-old civil war in Syria get underway in Geneva on Wednesday, and the omens are not that bad. Unless, of course, you were hoping for the overthrow of the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad and the emergence of a democratic Syria, in which case the omens are positively awful.
But if it's just peace you want at any price, then you may get some satisfaction soon. The breakthrough may not happen at Geneva this week, but the Russians and the Americans are now on the same side, and some of the rebels are getting ready to change sides. It won't be fast and it certainly won't be pretty, but there's a decent chance that peace, in the shape of an Assad victory, will return to Syria within a year or two.
What has made this possible is the jihadis, the fanatical extremists of the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who have frightened both the United States and a great many ordinary Syrians into seeing Assad's regime as the lesser evil. As usual, they poison almost everything they touch.
Two years ago, the lines were still clearly drawn, and it did seem possible that Assad could lose. The rebels, although almost all Sunni Muslims in a country that is only 70 percent Sunni, had the support of the United States, Turkey and powerful Sunni Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and they still talked about a democratic, inclusive Syria. Assad's only friends were Iran, Russia and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But then the jihadis showed up, alienating local people with their extreme version of sharia law and scaring the pants off the United States and Syria's non-Sunni Muslim minorities with their allegiance to al-Qaeda. It took the United States quite a while to figure out that it did not actually want Assad to fall if that meant putting the jihadis in power, but by last autumn it finally grasped the concept.
The catalyst was the poison gas attacks in Damascus last August, which forced the US to threaten air strikes against the Assad regime (because it had already declared the use of poison gas as a "red line"). But President Obama was clearly reluctant to carry out his threat, and then the Russians came up with the idea that Assad could hand over all his chemical weapons instead. Obama grabbed that lifeline and cancelled the air strikes.
Cancelling the air strikes meant that Assad was certain to survive, because the domestic rebels were never going to win in their own. It was only after that, it would seem, that Washington establishment finally admitted to itself that it preferred an Assad victory to a regime run by Islamist extremists (although it still couldn't say so publicly because Assad is definitely not a democrat).
In the meantime, a "war-within-the-war" has broken out among the rebels, with the secular groups fighting the jihadis and the jihadi groups fighting among themselves. So far in January more people have been killed in this internecine rebel war (over a thousand) than in the war against the regime. And the US and Russia are working on a deal that would swing a lot of the non-jihadi rebels over to the regime's side.
General Salim Idris, the commander of the Free Syrian Army (the main non-jihadi force on the battlefield), said last month that he and his allies were dropping the demand that Assad must leave power before the Geneva meeting convened. Instead, they would be content for Assad to go at the end of the negotiation process, at which time the FSA's forces would join with those of the regime in an offensive against the Islamists.
The Free Syrian Army's main external supporter, the United States, has already changed sides, and the FSA (or most of it) will also do so in due course. There will have to be amnesties and financial rewards for those who change sides, of course, but these things are easily arranged. And Assad will not leave power "at the end of the negotiation process."
The jihadis are not at Geneva this week, of course; just the Russians and the Americans, and the Assad regime and the Free Syrian Army, and a few odds and sods to make up the numbers. It is an ideal environment, in other words, for the regime and the secular rebels to discuss quietly how they might make a deal, with their Russian and American big brothers in attendance to smooth the path.
The fighting in Syria will continue for many months, even if a joint front of the regime and the FSA is formed to drive out the foreign extremists and eliminate the native-born ones. In practice it will probably be a good deal more ragged than that, with all sorts of local rebel groups trying to cut their own deals or holding out until the bitter end. But the final outcome has become clear, and it is no longer years and years away.
