Burhan Ghalioun has clarified the program of the Syrian National Council (SNC), which is preparing to rule Syria after the fall of the regime, with greater stress on the foreign policy that it will be adopting than focus on domestic policy and on the form the government and state institutions will be taking, not to mention the economy. His concern, as he behaved like the “President of the Syrian Arab Republic” (will it be keeping such a name, with the Kurds objecting to its Arab identity and the Islamists being universalists who do not care about national identity?), was to address Europe and the United States, as well as Israel. The conclusion of Professor Ghalioun's program is that it will be, when it rules Syria, opposed to Iran as well as to Hezbollah and armed resistance. Furthermore, it will immediately set out to engage in negotiations with Israel in order to recover the Golan, choosing to forget about the negotiations engaged in by the current regime which did not lead to any results, as well as the negotiations engaged in by the Palestinians for more than twenty years, under the sponsorship of those now sponsoring his Council. The question that can only be asked of Ghalioun is this: did he consult the Syrian people in a program that would determine their future for several decades if he were to come to power? Did he take into consideration, as a theorist on the development of societies and regimes, the fact that countryside (sectarian) awareness of revolution and politics has imposed itself on him, with pressure from the constituents of the SNC and its foreign relations based on politicizing religion, society and the state? The fact is that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed Ghalioun and the SNC when she heard from them everything she wanted to hear before the meeting. She heard and was pleased with the plan and the insistence on rejecting dialogue with the regime, as well as with the concordance of points of view with the Professor. During the meeting, Clinton took into consideration the entire conflict taking place in the region – the struggle between major colonial powers (does Ghalioun remember this concept?) over influence and wealth. Her government has taken its stances on the basis of such a struggle, in order to secure its interests. It has prepared to wage the battle in Damascus in collaboration with allies and friends. It has armed itself with the deployment of missile shields in Europe and Turkey in order to surround Russia, as well as with economic expansion (the economic pact) in Asia in order to surround China. Further and more dangerously than this, the United States is trying to feed sectarian and confessional conflicts in the Middle East in order to use them as weapons in confronting Syria and Iran, in order to ensure keeping Iraq under its umbrella. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov writes: “We are very concerned about a serious schism growing within the Islamic world, between Sunni and Shia. (…) Without help in reversing this trend, we could find ourselves witnessing very, very sad events”. The results of such a schism will reach the depth of Russia's Muslim republics. This explains Moscow's stance calling for reconciliation between Syrians. The Kremlin has put forward this view it holds to Ghalioun and has called on him to engage in dialogue with the regime, but he has refused, either to accommodate part of the street which he seeks to lead, or because the composition of the SNC and its relations do not allow him to do so. No one doubts that Ghalioun is well aware of all the strategic dimensions of the conflict over Syria and within it. His books and his studies bear witness to this. He has nonetheless brought with him to Washington the countryside awareness and sectarian interpretation of politics and of the movement of history. And he is not the only Arab intellectual to have reverted to such discourse and to have used it as a method to interpret events. Indeed, we have grown accustomed to such discourse accompanying civil wars, and to those who adopt it seeking after power at any cost. The opposition is not alone responsible for this, as totalitarian regimes have eradicated political parties, civil society and political culture. Their peoples have thus had no choice but to return to religion, sect, confession and clan, i.e. to pre-state identity. Yet that is one thing, and the return of an intellectual like Ghalioun to his “group” in order to lead it on the basis of such a primitive form of awareness is quite another.
