Dim prospects for Syrian talks

A long-awaited Syrian peace conference in Montreux, Switzerland, quickly degenerated this week into a cross fire of bitter accusations, raising serious doubts for a negotiated end to the bloody civil war that has already cost more than 130,000 lives. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem accused Arab nations of having “blood on their hands” for supporting the rebels, while Syrian opposition leader Ahmad Jarba countered that President Bashar al-Assad’s widespread atrocities disqualify him from any role in the transitional government that the U.N.-sanctioned talks are supposed to create. Secretary of State John Kerry agreed. “There is no way, no way possible, that a man who has led a brutal response to his own people can retain legitimacy to govern,” he said. The conference was set to move to Geneva, where representatives are supposed to sit down face-to-face.

“Absent a miracle, the talks will fail,” said Michael Doran and Michael O’Hanlon in USAToday.com. The two warring parties traveled to Switzerland with entirely conflicting aims—unless you count their common goal of achieving “the complete defeat of the other.” And just consider the “industrial strength mayhem” that the Geneva conference would have to pacify, said Marc Ginsberg in HuffingtonPost.com. “Overrun by warring gangs, rebels, terrorists, and military deserters,” Syria has become the battlefield for “the first full-blown Sunni-Shiite war in centuries.” Neither side is about to settle.

That is now “too much to ask for,” said Bloomberg.com in an editorial. But the factions should at least discuss a temporary cease-fire, even if it’s just “to bring humanitarian aid to the millions displaced” in the violence.

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Even that won’t happen without more pressure on Assad, said Joshua Landis in AlJazeera.com. Yet the U.S. has spent just $2 billion on Syria—“the equivalent of three days’ spending at the height of the Iraq War.” The opposition has already drawn the tragic conclusion: that for all the high-level talking, “the U.S. has practically no interest in the country’s civil war.”