The United States and its Western allies are still not confident about the ability of the armed Syrian opposition to assume power in Syria. Indeed, neither does its political structure allow this, nor does its Free Syrian Army (FSA) have the ability to hold the ground, or even to unify its ranks and form a General Staff that would draft plans, issue orders, and supervise operations. This is in addition to the fact that the FSA often clashes with its allies from among Islamist factions, such as the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda and dozens of other groups, as well as with warlords, street thugs, and influential parties in cities and villages. Ahead of all of this, this "army" even lacks a national doctrine, not having had the chance to formulate it and being unlikely to do so now, in view of its reliance on foreign support from multiple sources. These sources have the single goal of toppling the regime, but also have conflicting economic and political interests. Thus, while Turkey supports the Al-Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda, and clings to the Muslim Brotherhood as the alternative to the current regime, the United States and its other allies are trying to exclude Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda, and in fact seek to strike against them, having listed them as terrorist organizations. The situation in Syria, after more than two years of continuous wars, over a hundred thousand casualties and millions of refugees and displaced persons, has not yet matured, from the perspective of those allied against the regime, which is why they hesitate to take the unequivocal decision to change it by force. Most of their leaders, from Obama to his most minor ally, through Cameron and Hollande, have called for preserving the structure of the regime and the unity of the army, and for limiting the strike to chemical weapons locations and to means of command and control. Some have gone as far as to say that the aim of the strike is to produce a kind of balance between the regime and the armed fighters, after the army had achieved significant advances on most fronts, so as for Assad to come to Geneva 2 in a weakened state and agree to hand over power to a transitional government with full powers that would rebuild Syria and move it from one political alignment to the other. Obama and Cameron expressed this over the past three days, and Hollande formulated it during his meeting with President of the National Coalition Ahmad Jarba as follows: "Everything must be done to reach a political solution, but that will not happen unless the [opposition] coalition is capable of appearing as an alternative, with necessary force, notably its army. We will only achieve this if the international community is capable of bringing a stop to this escalation of violence, of which the chemical massacre is just one illustration". Such simplification makes no account of reactions to the proposed "surgical" strike, and portrays the matter as a mere walk in the park, or a security campaign to punish Assad, who has been making use of all possible means to kill his people. It is the same kind of simplification that has accompanied all previous Western wars and campaigns in the region, even in the time of the Crusades, if one wishes to look back at history, or more recently with the Iraq War. Indeed, the latter had been portrayed as a walk through the gardens of the Diyala Province or a touristic excursion in Babylon – only to have the most powerful army in the world sink in its quagmire for over ten years, costing Washington hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of casualties. Thus, until the FSA achieves balance on the ground, and until the National Coalition becomes able to lead the transitional period, we will be witnessing, unfortunately, more death and destruction, as well as more democratic discussions and wrong decisions in the West. Democracy in the West brings life to its people and death to ours.
