Kevin Barrett: Urge for Syria regime change West’s mistake

Press TV has interviewed Kevin Barrett, editor of Veterans Today in Madison, on remarks made by a senior Syrian official that the government will not make any new concessions in the upcoming Geneva peace talks.

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Basically the Syrian government, or at least in this case a senior member of the ruling party, is saying absolutely not, no more concessions. What do you think about that going into the talks? Do you think that Syria has taken a hard line or do you think that it is right what it should be doing?

Barrett: I think that the environment has changed and the key issue has been of course that the Western group of countries and their local puppet states have been insisting that there must be regime change and ‘Assad must go’ has been their mantra.

But I think that that now has changed a bit and there have been cracks and fissures in this Western coalition. Today we learned from Seymour Hersh, for example, that a major segment of the American military leadership does not particularly want Assad to go at all and that has been the case for quite some time, according to Hersh, and today I think things have moved even further in that direction.

So it does not surprise me at all when the Syrian leadership is saying that sorry, we are not going to be making any major concessions that would amount to this regime change demand that you have been forcing on this all these years with the Russian position in Syria, what it is now gains on the ground and a widening consensus even in the West that this insistence on Assad must go was a mistake in the first place. I do not think we should be at all surprised that we are hearing the Syrian government that they are not going to buckle and accept these demands. So I do not think this is a sign of any particular hard line shift. I think it is just basic political reality.

Press TV: Are you optimistic, of course we still do not know exactly when these talks are going to actually get started, it seems like it is going to be delayed, are you optimistic though that these talks can begin to pave the way to peace or do you think the two sides are still so far away from each other in order to do that?

Barrett: I do think that the anti-government side maybe coming to recognize that there won’t be a military solution that would give them anything close to what they want and that therefore probably the solution will be closer to what the Syrian government has been suggesting, and of course its backers, especially Iran and Russia to some extent, have been saying that there needs to be a kind of a negotiated solution with elections but in which there is no preconceived idea or any kind of requirement that anybody in the current government step down. Assad and anybody else should be allowed to run for office.

And indeed the polling data even from Al Jazeera, from Qatar, the country that has been pushing perhaps almost the hardest for regime change, showed all the way down the line that there is a very substantial segment of the Syrian public that supports President Assad, so of course he should be allowed to continue to be part of the political process and I think that the solution is going to be one in which the different groups end up essentially coming back in from the cold.  

Those groups, they are not extremist Takfiri terrorists but are in fact willing to work with a kind of a Syrian coalition of different forces that are going to figure out how to live together. Those groups are going to have to come back into the political process and we are going to see elections and we are going to see the current government perhaps loosening up and gradually evolving, but not just all at once stepping down and allowing regime change to succeed.

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