“We will provide the revolutionaries in Syria with food so that they do not fight on an empty stomach, until Putin finds the magical solution". If this is the new American vision in approaching a war and a revolution that have almost completed their second year in Syria, and if President Barack Obama's administration has indeed asked Kremlin to try its luck in finding this solution, then the positions issued by American Secretary of State John Kerry during his Gulf tour mean that his country has gone from its state of retreat to adopt the “old turtle" diplomacy. The Americans are filling the empty stomachs, while the Syrian army is receiving enough Russian-Iranian military support to prevent the regime's collapse and the victory of those classified by Kremlin as being extremists or armed groups. The question at this level is the following: Did Kerry's promise result in an air corridor to deliver cheese and readymade meals to the Free Army, while the Scud missiles are still falling onto the cities and destroying buildings and lives? The fall of the city of Rakka in the northern part of Syria might signal change in the balance of powers on the ground, one on which the states which participated in the Rome meeting have been wagering. And while the discrepancy persists between Moscow's perception of dialogue between the regime and the opposition with the participation of President Bashar al-Assad, and the West and Arab states – including the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council – which exclude any role by Al-Assad in the transitional phase, it was clear that the Syrian president undermined the Russian pressures on his Foreign Minister Walid Muallem who announced the acceptance of dialogue with the armed oppositionists, as Al-Assad set disarmament as a condition for such dialogue. We thus saw a return to square one, causing Moscow to adopt another course to shift the attention away from its stillborn initiative and render the victim the criminal, and the criminal a necessary passageway for the solution. But what is noticeable at the level of Russia's exaggeration of the danger of the armed groups in the Golan, is that it coincided with Israel's talk about steps to deter any anarchy on the outskirts of the occupied Heights. And while Al-Assad addressed the first blow to the Russian initiative by calling for the opposition's disarmament, the second blow was delivered by Iran which publicly announced its support of the Syrian president's stay in power until 2014 and the date of the upcoming elections. It is as though Tehran was addressing a message to the West, and especially to America, saying that it monopolizes the key to the solution. Clearly, the Russian-Iranian divergence over the conflict in Syria will push Al-Assad to further insist on the fact that he does not hear anyone calling on him to step down or leave. He might not have heard about the fall of 70,000 dead during the war he is describing as being cosmic. And as he is announcing his victory and risking the weakening of the Russian political support offered to him, he appears to be the hostage of Iranian calculations that have been successful since March 2011, but are turning into a noose around the regime's neck whenever the Free Army manages to deplete its forces' strength. On the opposite end of the Russian-Iranian divergence, there is a Gulf-American divergence towards the arming of the opposition. There is even a Gulf disgruntlement towards the turtle approach adopted by Obama's second administration and provoked by concerns surrounding the absence of guarantees preventing the fall of weapons into the wrong hands (i.e. those of Al-Nusra Front among other extremist factions). These are the same hands which Moscow and Tel Aviv perceive as being the cause of nightmares in the Golan, and whose threats are causing the departure of United Nations troops from the Golan. Once again, the American and Russian pretexts converge, thus granting the Syrian regime more time and causing the Syrians to lose thousands of lives. In the meantime, the opposition is earning support for the empty stomachs through American food aid, and Israel is earning more opportunities to exercise blackmail on Obama's administration. It is not enough for the Syrians to hear Washington talking over and over again about the loss of legitimacy by the regime and its head. Moreover, Obama's grief will not stop the killing and comprehensive destruction of Syria. And while two years of tragedy convinced the United States to offer food to the revolutionaries, the Russian-American dialogue is prone to extend the war and these tragedies. It might appear to some that the Iranian ally of the Syrian regime is using the revolution and the Western concerns over the possible control of its course by Al-Nusra Front and the extremists, as a new stalling card in the context of the nuclear negotiations, assuming that the superpowers' priority is to prevent the expansion of the fires from Syria to the neighboring states. But what if Washington is truthful and announces the end of the race with the Iranian maneuvers? The fate of the revolution in Syria will probably continue to oscillate between those who do not hear, who do not see those who do not believe in Damascus, and those in Tehran who are delusional by thinking that the American turtle will remain the only player. What is certain is that the American-Russian warnings against the expansion of the fire in Syria to the neighboring states are sincere, at a time when the foreign minister in Lebanon – which is divided on itself and over its neutrality policy – volunteered to call for the activation of Syria's membership in the Arab League, and consequently for the revival of the regime's Arab legitimacy. A few hours before that, Qatari Prime Minister Hamad Bin Jassem had described the head of the regime of being a terrorist. The wisdom in Lebanon is that it is distancing itself, yet rushing towards the flames.
