The United States will have to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a political transition in Syria and is exploring ways to pressure him into agreeing to talks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News in an interview.
Washington has long insisted that Assad must be replaced through a negotiated, political transition, but the rise of a common enemy, hardline militant group Islamic State, appears to have slightly softened the West’s stance towards him.
In the interview broadcast on Sunday, Kerry did not repeat the standard U.S. line that Assad had lost all legitimacy and had to go. Syria’s civil war is now into its fifth year, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions of Syrians displaced.
“We have to negotiate in the end,” Kerry said. “We’ve always been willing to negotiate in the context of the Geneva I process,” he added, referring to a 2012 conference which called for a negotiated transition to end the conflict.
Kerry said the United States and other countries, which he did not name, were exploring ways to reignite the diplomatic process to end the conflict in Syria.
“What we’re pushing for is to get him (Assad) to come and do that, and it may require that there be increased pressure on him of various kinds in order to do that,” the secretary of state said.
“We’ve made it very clear to people that we are looking at increased steps that can help bring about that pressure,” he added.
The United States led efforts to convene a UN-backed peace talks in Geneva last year between Western-backed Syrian opposition representatives and a government delegation. The talks collapsed after two rounds and no fresh talks have been scheduled.
Russia convened some opposition and government figures in January for talks on the crisis but they yielded little progress and the main opposition coalition boycotted them.
“To get the Assad regime to negotiate, we’re going to have to make it clear to him that there is a determination by everybody to seek that political outcome and change his calculation about negotiating,” Kerry said.
“That’s under way right now. And I am convinced that, with the efforts of our allies and others, there will be increased pressure on Assad.”
Syria sank into civil war after a peaceful street uprising against four decades of Assad family rule began in March 2011. The revolt spiraled into an armed insurgency, which has deepened with the rise of Islamic State and other hardliners.
Assad seems more likely to survive the Syrian crisis than at any point since it began. Iran’s support for Assad is as solid as ever, with Russia showing no sign of abandoning him.
U.S-led forces started air strikes against Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq in the summer. Washington has said the campaign in Syria is not coordinated with the Syrian military, which also views the group as its enemy.
The war has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced close to half the population, according to the United Nations. Damascus accuses its Western and Gulf Arab opponents of seeking to destroy the country by providing aid to an insurgency now dominated by jihadists, who also pose a threat to the West.
Assad appears to be betting that the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State will force Washington to engage with him.
If the Americans had any decency and cared about human lives and well-being, then after seeing the disastrous consequences of their invasion of Iraq on fabricated charges, they would not have interfered in any other country, at east in Middle East and its neighbourhood. However, it seems they were rather encouraged by the results – nearly a million innocent Iraqis dead and a fairly stable, prosperous country brought to ruins – and did the same to Syria and Libya. And now the region faces the threat of Daesh (so-called Islamic state) which is the direct result of Americans' destruction of Iraq.
Still they won't leave the region alone and the US and its allies are continuing to maintaian their strangle-hold on it, only this time as saints and angels in their noble role of peace-makers. The US Secretary of State John Kerry just said quite innocently "US will have to negotiate with Syria's Assad."
Who was Barack Obama to say "Assad has lost all legitimacy and has to go".
Some body with a little bit of sense would have realized long time back that Bashar al-Assad, who enjoys support from Russia and Iran, and more than that from his own army and people, can not be removed that easy. However, the Americans continued their efforts to topple Assad, and even in the fifth year, when they have accepted the need to negotiate with him, Kerry expresses the intention of increasing pressure on Assad in order to bring him down on his knees, and then perhaps to force him to go. And that means increasing further the suffering of Syrians within Syria, as well millions others living in absolute misery in neighbouring states as refugees, since they can't return to Syria with escalating violence there.
The fact is that most of the US lawmakers and state officials gain and maintain their positions through support and generous funding by Jewish billionaires in America. As such, they consider it their primary duty to be to protect the interests of Israel, and to pave the way for its further expansion in the region, because such acts bring them hefty bonuses in addition to other benefits like security of employment. After eliminating threat from Iraq, which was a powerful enemy of Israel, the Americans are now after Syria while they bought off Egypt long time back by offering it annual aid. And now Syria is being hacked down to facilitate Israel's further expansion beyond the occupied Golan Heights.
Israeli and Jewish influence on the US can be judged by the fact Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited by the Congress to address its joint session in flagrant violation of protocol and without bringing the White House into the loop. Now, taking it as an affront, some US lawmakers staged their protest by boycotting Netanyahu's address. And now the Jewish financiers of most of the US lawmakers have warned that as a punishment for their defiance, such lawmakers will not receive funding and other help at the next elections.
Unfortunately for us Muslims, such a miserable and helpless super power as the US has set out on reforming and reshaping the world, more so the Muslim world. What a shame.
Karachi
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