Abandoning Hope

"Either these people have no capacity to express their love and care for Syria, or they are ordered by foreign powers to ignore what is most important and most urgent for their country."
Bouthaina Shaaban, Assad adviser

STR/AFP/Getty Images

The last, desperate attempts to have the Syrian regime representatives meet alongside representatives of the Syrian opposition with UN special adviser/intermediary Lakhdar Brahimi fielding and interpreting, countering and reiterating, acting as a go-between for the two sides refusing to so much as acknowledge one another's presence, has resulted in not very much of anything.

Nevertheless, Mr. Baahimi, an experienced, seasoned interlocutor expressed not an attitude of defeat, but of hope.

There is scant hope to be had in the fact that the Syrian government -- which, in effect is President Bashar al-Assad himself -- refuses to discuss his replacement, interim or otherwise as leader of a country he feels entitled to rule through familial inheritance. It is his country, in the sense that it is his domain within which he is free to do as he will to settle an internal argument of his Shia Alawite sect ruling a majority Sunni population.

And if that freedom to act includes bombing his own cities, including Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, then so be it, for they are his to determine how best to mount his defensive against the terrorists that threaten his indomitable reign. His opponents cannot possibly be loyal Syrians in forming a determination to challenge the unchallengeable. They are curs, scum, foreign-invested jihadists whose business is to bring chaos and collapse to his country.

Homs City Union of the Revolution/AP

It is irrelevant that even as his delegation agrees to permit women and children to exit their place of confining starvation in Homs, his military is still bombing them. It is of no moment that he saw fit to bomb a Damascus suburb and its sleeping residents with weapons of mass destruction, enabling sarin to destroy the lives of a thousand innocent men, women and children. It is a blatant lie that he has authorized his troops to abduct, torture and slaughter men from villages he views as resistant to his rule.

So it is entirely logical and indeed consistent that his adviser present at the negotiations expressed her horror at the lack of "love and care for Syria" on the part of the opposition, for having the unmitigated gall to reject the regime's offers to settle the situation to the regime's satisfaction; an "expression of good will" in search of common ground.

The common ground the opposition is intent on approaching is the elevation of a transitional government with full executive powers to lead the country until legitimate elections can be held.

Little wonder there is irreconcilability on the part of the two sides; the reasonable regime and the utterly fathomless, unreasonable opposition.