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What could go wrong?

Tucked away in Fred Hof’s latest post on Syria, is an extraordinary condemnation of the Obama adminsitration’s ineptitude on Syria:

The Obama administration did not anticipate that the Assad regime would use the Washington-Moscow agreement on chemical weapons as a free pass to terrorize civilian populations. When the administration pressed for the setting of a conference date, it did not intend for the regime to treat that date as an interim finish line, as it sprints for military advantage with the critical assistance of Iranian-raised militias and Russian rearmament. When the administration urged the nationalist Syrian opposition to commit itself to attending the conference, it had no inkling that Islamist rivals to the West’s opposition of choice would humiliate the recipients of US meals-ready-to-eat, medical kits, and pickup trucks.

None of these setbacks was difficult to anticipate.  Many commenters wrote about how the chemical weapons agreement would make the Asad regime an essential partner to the international community and stabilize its hold on power.  The speed-up of military efforts is canonical behavior before peace negotiations.  The takeover of the opposition by Islamist forces had been widely anticipated, even if the particular seizure of supplies was not.

Now let’s anticipate the possible negative consequences of the January 22 (Montreux) and January 23 (Geneva) meetings, assuming that the Syrian opposition follows much Western advice and goes into them with a sincere list of nationalist figures, heavily loaded with minorities and not too offensive to the Russians, to staff the post-Asad regime.  What might go wrong? Read more