It might be too early to judge the possibility of success of Russia's proposal to have Bashar Al-Assad's chemical arsenal placed under international control before being destroyed. Indeed, negotiations between international parties are only beginning, amid conditions and counter-conditions. Yet the fact that Syria immediately agreed to it, and subsequently the fact that the United States accepted to give it a chance, makes it likely that some kind of settlement will be reached, and at the same time proves a number of facts about the nature of the regime in Damascus and the current US administration. Indeed, one of the main pillars of the regime established by Hafez Al-Assad a little over forty years ago is to make use of external strength against the interior – i.e. to give priority, effort and importance to everything outside of Syria and to ignore the Syrian interior completely, unless it comes to represent some kind of threat, in which case it would be dealt with in the way a heartless jailor might deal with a rebellious prisoner. Because external powers are important, they must not be provoked to such an extent as to force them to sever all ties and make use of force. This has happened before. In 1998, the tension reached its peak between the Syrian regime and Turkey, which threatened to invade Syrian territory and amassed its army at the border, accusing Damascus of supporting the attacks of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and embracing its leader, Abdullah Ocalan. The Syrians understood that Turkey's behavior, as a member of NATO, was supported by major powers. Damascus thus yielded to the threat, expelled Ocalan from its territory, paving the way for his arrest, and pledged to stop supporting the Kurdish rebels. Today the same situation is being repeated, albeit under different circumstances: when Damascus felt that the American threat to direct a military strike against its army's vital centers was about to be carried out for lack of a political way out, it asked its Russian sponsor to put forward this proposal. The latter was announced while Walid Muallem was visiting Moscow, knowing that such a visit had been announced prior to the summit of the Group of Twenty (G20) held in Saint Petersburg – i.e. that the initiative had been ready and was discussed by Putin with Obama during their brief meeting on the sidelines of the summit, as they have both admitted. Thus the Syrian regime has once again shown that it was ready to offer anything in order to survive, and was prepared to relinquish all of its slogans about "strategic balance" with Israel and "defiance" when its own fate was at stake. What matters is for it not to relinquish anything to its own people, and to remain able to control the machine of repression it has unleashed against them. As for Washington, its handling of the Syrian issue has been characterized by a series of retractions, for which justifications have not always been understandable, sometimes even for members of the administration themselves. It has found in the Russian initiative a means of salvation from a military adventure it did not wish to embark on in the first place, despite its forbidding stances, its talk of keeping the military option on the table and of time limits, and its other similar instruments of negotiation. Barack Obama has breathed a sigh of relief, because he is no longer forced to depart from his doctrine of avoiding war, as long as his administration's main concern, i.e. the security of Israel, can be guaranteed without him having to make use of his army's muscle power. He also does not mind pulling the Russians' leg and making them believe that they have returned to be a major world power that can wrestle with the world's sole superpower, because he can leap over them at any time and on any occasion. There is but a single loser in this entire mess, and that is the Syrian opposition. Assad's army is striking against it with all the power it can muster, aided by its Iranian and Lebanese allies, and will not stop doing so. The West is in effect abandoning it, pretexting its division and the fundamentalism of some of the groups that it consists of, and not caring if the civil war were to last for years, as long as it does not represent a regional threat – as if the problem with the Assad regime was the kinds of weapons it uses. As for the Arabs, divided as always, they are helpless and powerless.
