By: Issam Khoury

      Politics is not an ideal state, a lot of war criminals today have become  political leaders, as is the case in Lebanon, but this only occurred after decades of reconciliations, which were supervised by international and regional powers.

    Unfortunately, history is repeating itself today on the Syrian territory, in an international thought that what happens on the Syrian territory is only a military conflict that produced a state of terror that worries the entire world called the “ISLAMIC STATE”, and the most common  question and query throughout the whole decision-making circles that we visit has become the following “in case we responded to the request of overthrowing and tumbling down the Syrian dictator off the seat of government, who would be the alternative? ” .

   Yes indeed, it is a disturbing question for everybody. Unfortunately, a lot of opponents of the regime do not look at the essence of the question, rather they only think about its causes and justifications, since in their own perspective, the Assad is the one who distorted the Syrian people’s revolution, and he is the one who released criminals and armed them to make the revolution an armed one, so that the Assad obtains a valid excuse that he is fighting against the political military Islam groups that produced the two organizations which are listed as Terrorist organizations  … Yes , Assad did all that and much more, but currently ; we are in front of a complex military panel that is rich with armed militias, and at the present we have to deal with all those outcomes as an existing reality, and not as a result.

      The international community  looks at  AL -Assad as a futile president, for if he were ever successful , he would not have asked the help of the military wing of Hezbollah which is inscribed on terrorism lists. Yes al-Assad today is at his weakest states, where the Israeli’s are bombing his arms and yet he is unable even of responding orally, the thing that he used to do repeatedly years ago at least saying, “we keep our right of response.”

     However and on the other hand; there are some armed groups that do not ever contain the values of “freedom and justice” called for by the rebels, and such groups see democracy as a crime and as an agent of the infidel West, and this is exactly why , these groups did not embrace the political opposition, which is based in Turkey and, unfortunately, the political opposition does not have the operational tools to force these groups to comply with the language of reason and wisdom, and thus the political state of the opposition becomes as weak as the Assad’s state..

    All of these outcomes have made the Geneva negotiations indeed the negotiations of the  weak , while the crucial and critical political decisions are drawn and made by the senior negotiators “The Russians and the Americans,” who are seeking, through other channels to neutralize the regional players and keep them away from the Syrian file, so that the two major headlines of the negotiation become as  : ((fighting against terrorism according to the International Classification, and Syria a secular democracy as included in the Vienna text))

     According to these classifications We actually have to look and think about the future. No  Syrian can live with terrorists: al-Assad as well as ISIS, both torture and kill civilians in prisons through his military mechanisms. Moreover; both of the Assads, the father and the son, have never been secularists, rather they were trading under the slogan of secularism , exactly as done by the political Islam military groups who are trading under the slogan of the Islamic religion, and when the Assad , against his will, decided by force to write a new constitution after the outbreak of the protests, he put a constitutional provision to prevent the candidacy of Syrian Yezidi and Christian communities to the post of president of the republic, in a clear illustration of his violation to the values of citizenship!

      So the Geneva negotiations, in their major headlines, are negotiations that stand by  the values of the revolution “freedom and dignity” that the Syrian people up rose for, and the task of the opposition negotiators should be seeking to highlight the similarities between the Assad family and the terrorist organizations that should not at all be overlooked. They should also clarify that The presence of al Assad itself enhances The presence  and the increase of terrorism, and an obstacle to the return of refugees whose number has exceeded the four million according to the tables of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition to that, the duty of the opposition is to focus on the importance of maintaining the state institutions, and implying incremental administrative changes in conjunction with a mechanism to the abandon of al-Assad  the seat of government, and the Russians should be convinced of this step, due to the fact that the Russians are the ones who at the present own the thick stick needed for the implementation of this scheme, and certainly the Americans will support this orientation.

        In politics nothing is impossible, and the main task of the opposition negotiators is to prevent war criminals from becoming political leaders, as the case is in Lebanon, otherwise; in the future, we’ll see baby Hafez, the son of Bashar al- Assad, as a political leader in the mountains of Alawites in the Syrian coast, which is quite insulting  to the Alawite sect, which owns so many intellectuals and writers and does not at all need thieves who stole Syria for half a century to represent them.