Michael Weiss

Washington’s belated attempt to reinvent the Syrian opposition and create a viable and inclusive government-in-exile failed in record time. Announced last week by Hillary Clinton—on Halloween, appropriately enough—the Syrian National Initiative was designed to sideline the furtive and corrupt Syrian National Council, which is and always has been dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and exiles in need of constituencies. What it achieved was that trademark feat of the Obama administration’s Middle East policymaking: the alienation of everyone at all once. On Wednesday night, the eve of the SNI’s big launch conference in Doha, delegates from three participating groups—the National Coordinating Committee, the Syrian Democratic Platform and the Kurdish National Council—walked out in frustration. “There are too many people against this initiative for it to work now,” a Western diplomat told the Daily Telegraph in what by now must be a mantra sewn into Western diplomats’ underwear.

Useless as it may be to write an epitaph on the still-born: the SNI was meant to satisfy three outstanding problems that have bedeviled the US’ Syria planning for months. The first was the expansion of minorities’ and women’s representation within the ranks of the political opposition, where the SNC’s Sunni Arab chauvinism and misogyny had only frightened them away. The second was the creation of some civilian oversight over the atomized and ideologically motley rebel forces in Syria via a “Supreme Military Council.” The third was the development of a credible and accountable transitional government to assume control of the state once Bashar al-Assad is gone.

Had such an effort been attempted in earnest a year ago—when Washington decided to outsource the political composition of the opposition to Turkey and then wondered how it ended up engaging a gang of Islamist charlatans—the SNI might have stood a chance of success. Today, however, it looks groping and last-ditch. Absolutely no one believed State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland when she expanded on Clinton’s comments at a later press conference: “Our conversations with the Syrians have not been prescriptive.” Sure they have; it’s just that the Syrians aren’t listening anymore.
 
Syrian activist Riad al-Seif himself tried to deny that he was ever the appointed primus inter pares of the SNI, a decidedly difficult task given that the thing was instantly branded the “Seif-Ford initiative” (after former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford) and that the SNI’s foundational “blueprint” bore his name of authorship. The 66-year-old now insists that he is too old and too ill (cancer) to helm any assembly. The Local Coordination Committees, meanwhile, condemned Clinton’s remarks as “unwelcome” and implied that Washington had no business lecturing the opposition when it wasn’t providing substantive material (read: weapons) to on-the-ground actors. Rebel brigades and battalions ignored the SNI announcement altogether, as did the usually soundbite-ravenous Riad al-Assaad of the Free Syrian Army, perhaps out of sneaking sympathy for seeing yet another obsolete outfit repudiated. Naturally, the SNC responded angrily, with acting Chairman Abdulbaset Seida, former Chairman Burhan Ghalioun and Executive Committee member Samir Nashar claiming that the State Department was now trying to de-legitimatize the players it formerly legitimized. This is how Bashar once felt.
 
The SNC, which hosted its own conference in Doha a few days before the launch of its replacement, has desperately tried to remain relevant the only way it knows how—by shooting itself in the foot. It has expanded its lower assembly to over 400 seats and purged from its upper echelon the only figures whom the West ever tolerated: Ghalioun, Seif and George Sabra (a rare Christian member). The three are thus off the General Secretariat, meaning that none can assume or help determine the SNC chairmanship in future. It’s a characteristic move by an organization that has never understood why it is held in such disdain and why, as Clinton said, it “can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition.”
 
As Ammar Abulhamid notes, the Syrian Brotherhood was bolstered by the belief that the support shown by the White House to Brotherhood parties in Egypt and Tunisia, both before and after their democratic elections, was a sign that an Islamist putsch would be tolerated in Syria in advance of regime change. The only preconditions were a cosmetic pluralism and rhetoric that never transcended obscurantist happy-talk about ethnic “mosaics” and “civil” states.

Indeed, one very nice American diplomat told me several months ago that the first speech Ghalioun delivered in which he acceded to a “de-centralized” government for Syrian Kurds had been more or less drafted by Clinton’s office. Not that it did them much good. As the Kurds were quick to point out, “de-centralization” was already a fact of life in Hasakah province prior to the Syrian uprising; this is why Kurdish schools and community centers were so easily erected after the protests kicked off in March 2011. What most Kurds want is autonomy à la Iraq.
 
Another problem has been the SNC’s baffling inconsistency on where it stands on matters of grave importance to the Syrian “street.” Brigadier General Akil Hashem told me that when the council approached him to be one of three members of its “military advisory bureau” (Riad al-Assaad and Mustafa al-Sheikh were supposed to be the other two despite the fact that both men hate each other), he accepted on the condition that he be allowed to advocate direct military intervention. At the press conference held in Paris on March 1 announcing the formation of this bureau, then-SNC Chairman Ghalioun refused Hashem’s demand, despite intervention having been the official position of the council for months. So Hashem didn’t join and now laughs whenever he hears an SNC representative chastise the US for failing to intervene in Syria.
 
Sometimes the hypocrisy is married to fraudulence. Thaer Abboud, a revolutionary Alawite whom I met in Antakya last August, relayed this plausible story to the Guardian’s Martin Chulov:  “I was at a meeting in Cairo in May. It was an important gathering in the Semiramis Hotel and Robert Ford... was there. One delegate, a well-known SNC member, started accusing the Americans of not helping them, not doing this or that. Ford replied that he was the one a very large amount of money had been sent to, and where had it gone? He sat down and didn’t say a word and was chased out of the room by the other people there. It was shameful.”

One former SNC delegate told me that he was offered a bribe to remain on board lest his defection embarrass the organization.
 
Where does this, then, leave Syria’s fraught political opposition? For anyone who has been following developments in the country for the past six months, the substantive news this week will have been the announcements by Britain to establish a line of communication with the rebels and the request made of NATO by Turkey to deploy Patriot missiles to the Turkish-Syrian border. (Question: How do you establish a no-fly zone or safe area in northern Syria without aircraft? Answer: With Patriot missiles.)  Both developments were—I think it’s reasonable to assume—timed to coincide with the US presidential election. Both also hint at what has been inevitable for much longer than six months: Namely, that a Western-backed military solution is the only way forward in Syria, particularly as Assad has once again avowed his admiration of the Ceausescu model of political transition.
 
What comes next politically may be beyond the reach of US influence, however. Where conspiratorial anti-Americanism and vogue “anti-imperialism” never much factored on the ground in Syria during the early days of the protest movement, they do now, thanks largely to Western inaction, which has led to the dire radicalization of anti-Assad elements. On September 19, Islamists finally won the weekly Facebook plebiscite to name the Friday Day of Rage “Oh, America, haven’t had enough of our blood yet?”

Obama may have won a second term, but a second chance in Syria may prove more elusive.