THIS is a crucial week for the Syrian opposition movement. The meeting of the Syrian National Council in the Qatari capital, Doha, is seen by some as a make or break four days for the country's revolution. This summit follows the spectacular failure of a similar gathering in Cairo in July, when partisan bickering sabotaged the chances of the political opposition to agree on anything at all, except that the Assad regime must be brought down. The vacuum in the political leadership with the SNC incapable of speaking with a single, unified voice has been an outstanding weakness, which Assad and his people have been able to exploit. Since the uprising began in March 2011, the regime has always pretended that it was willing to talk to the opposition. It has, however, claimed that such negotiations were impossible because there was no united opposition with whom it could sit down. Some commentators noted after the chaotic collapse of the Cairo talks that Assad could not have been happier. Indeed one observer wondered if there were not elements within the SNC that had deliberately wrecked the summit because they were in the pay of Damascus or Moscow. There are two major challenges that have arisen from the failure of the political leadership to find a single voice with which to speak. The first is that the international community has been unable to focus its support for the uprising on a single credible political entity. Washington and Europe believe that the civil war will have to end with negotiations. Even assuming the Free Syrian Army defeats Assad's forces completely, Washington and Brussels are assuming that there will then have to be a negotiated political settlement which embraces all of Syria's different communities. The second challenge is that it is not the disparate political leadership in and around the SNC that is doing the fighting and dying in Syria itself. There is inevitably a degree of contempt on the part of the fighters for those who claim to be speaking in their name. Thus the FSA effectively boycotted the Cairo talks organized so carefully by the Arab League. This rendered the talks a meaningless failure. Moreover, even had the SNC been a truly representative and authoritative body, it is likely that some elements of the FSA, which are as split and independent-minded as the SNC itself, would still have chosen to go their own way. Nor should it be forgotten that Al-Qaeda has now moved into the struggle, fighting its own war with very different ambitions than the SNC. Indeed the last thing Al-Qaeda wants to see is a settled, pluralist Syria. They want the country to collapse because, as they demonstrated in Iraq, they can feed greedily on its wounds and thrive within its instability. A strong political leadership could isolate the terrorist elements within the uprising, maybe even uniting the FSA sufficiently, so that it would drive Al-Qaeda from the field. Therefore the four days of meetings in Doha are crucial for Syria's future. If, yet again, a stable and viable political consensus cannot be found and if the Syrian opposition cannot agree on a single platform and find a single voice with which to speak to the world, then Syria's tragedy, which has already cost over 36,000 lives, will be doomed to continue and worsen.
