Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the West of playing a “double game” with “terrorist” groups in Syria, where Moscow and a US-led coalition are conducting separate bombing campaigns. “It’s always difficult to play a double game: declaring a fight against terrorists while simultaneously trying to use some of them to arrange the pieces on the Middle East chess board in one’s own interests,” Putin said at a meeting of political scientists in Sochi known as the Valdai Club.”It is impossible to prevail over terrorism if some of the terrorists are being used as a battering ram to overthrow undesirable regimes,” Putin said.Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is set to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as their Turkish and Saudi counterparts, in Vienna on Friday for crucial talks on the Syrian conflict, a four-year war that has killed more 250,000 people and forced millions from their homes. The high-level meeting follows the surprise visit of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Moscow for talks with Putin on Tuesday, the embattled leader’s first foreign visit since 2011. Russia stands firmly and now officially, behind the Syrian regime – the stance that was declared by the Russian military intervention has been politically reiterated. The United States of America is predictably fuming, and it has ample justification to be. A refuge crisis in Europe and its resulting increase in xenophobia, the death and destruction in Syria, its spillover effects in Iraq, Libya and Turkey, adventurism by Iran in Iraq and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, all of these are rooted in Syrian civil war. It is Syrian territory that supports and supplies Islamic State, and hence supports the global threat and Al-Qaeda compulsion to respond.
This human cost surely outweighs any legal or politically normative ideas.
A political solution that sees the Syrian regime maintain power but sees Assad step down – at least officially – is not an easy pill to swallow, but perhaps getting a handle on the Syrian civil war would make the other problems relatively manageable.That is the silver lining in the Moscow meeting; Assad has indicated that he is willing to compromise. Will the solution be acceptable to the Syrian people, or more importantly, the west remains to be seen.The danger is that a change in policy will feel too much like a defeat, in the same manner as the Iran Nuclear deal was presented as a defeat.It is hoped that the horror of the conditions in Syria can change such opinions that the survival of humanity is not trumped by power concerns in another cold war.
pk.shafaqna.com
