Desperate for Relief 

"We did not expect instant breakthroughs. The Syrian people are looking desperately for relief from the nightmare in which they are trapped."
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

"The terrorist threat that is developing in Syria is real. It is a threat to the stability of the entire region and beyond. It is a war we have seen before on the streets of Baghdad, and its agents are ones who have been hardened by the wars of the last decade."
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird

"We need to deal with reality here. Bashar al-Assad will not be part of that transition government. There is no way that the man who has led the brutal response to his own people could regain the legitimacy to govern."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

And so, in Montreux, Switzerland, the long-awaited intervention hopes of the civilized world that the savagery continuing to unfold in Syria -- with the regime dependent on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for military aid alongside Iran's Hezbollah militias to confront the legitimate aspirations of the majority Syrian Sunnis with bombs, artillery, sharpshooters, arrest, torture and murder, echoed in part by the entry into the chaos of Sunni Islamist jihadis -- might be apprehended by some miracle.

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

 

The unthinkable was achieved, with representatives of the Syrian regime present along with representatives of the opposition Syrian National Coalition. Not that they would be expected to greet one another cordially with handshakes and civil debate, but to be present where representatives of the international community invested in seeking a solution to the horror unfolding in Syria even as they met, and hoped it might be dimly possible to reach some acceptance.

Time allotted equally to all speakers, and then antagonistic resentment erupted when Ban Ki-moon admonished Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem that he was running over his time frame.

"I came here 12 hours in the airplane. I have few more minutes to end my speech", he insisted.

"Can you just wrap up in one or two minutes?" asked Mr. Ban.

"No, I can't promise you, I must finish my speech."

"We have to have some constructive and harmonious dialogue, please refrain from inflammatory rhetoric."

"It is constructive, I promise you, let me finish."

"Within two-three minutes please, I will give you another opportunity."

"You spoke for 25 minutes, at least I need to speak 30 minutes."

In all of this, and it has just begun, the towering ghost in the room is the terrorist Islamist jihadis marauding through Syria and how they will be dealt with in their ferocious determination to turn the country into their very own Sharia state. Will it become necessary for the regime to accept that its strength in the south and the west will be all that will be left to it of what was once Syria? Leaving the north to the rebels to fight it out with the Islamists?

Syria blames Saudi Arabia for prolonging the conflict by funding opposition forces. And just as Bashar al-Assad had predicted, warned, threatened, Syria did indeed represent a cauldron which would spill its poison over, once tipped, onto the surrounding geography. Drawing in Lebanon and possibly Iraq. Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt are struggling with the influx of millions of Syrian refugees desperate to escape the carnage in their country.

Protesters supporting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria demonstrated on Wednesday in Montreux, Switzerland, the site of the peace talks. Salvatore Di Nolfi/European Pressphoto Agency

Iraq and Lebanon have become embroiled in the sectarian conflict, inevitably, while Jordan is threatened to a lesser degree and Turkey and Egypt have their own internal problems to deal with; Egypt shedding Islamism and Turkey blemished by its growing Islamist authoritarianism. As for the new proof of Syrian regime atrocities brought to the attention of the world by a Syrian police defector with photographic evidence of gruesome torture and mass murder; this is a Western plot.

"You should not be traitors to the Syrian people, agents in the pay of enemies of the Syrian people", Walid Al-Moallem tongue-lashed the opposition. The revolution against the Assad rule represented "princes and emirs living in mud and backwardness" funding Islamist terrorists to bring misery and death to Syria.

Ahmed Al-Jarba, head of he Syrian National Coalition had his own take on the matter: "The pictures of torture are unprecedented except in the Nazi camps". Which did nothing to stop Mr. Moallem from attacking the "petrodollars" exporting "Wahhabi" terrorism, and "backstabbing neighbours" opening their borders to the opposition rebel forces.