By Con Coughlin World Last updated: January 21st, 2014
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The Telegraph
*** Con Coughlin is the Telegraph's Defence Editor and a world-renowned expert on global security and terrorism issues. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books. His new book, Churchill's First War: Young Winston and the fight against the Taliban, is published by Macmillan. He appears regularly on radio and television in Britain and America.
Bashar al-Assad's regime could face war crimes charges, according to top prosecutors and forensic experts Photo: REUTERS
What a way to run a peace conference. One minute the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wants the Iranians to attend; the next he is forced into the humiliating position of withdrawing his invitation to Tehran, with all the implications that is likely to have for the success of this week's scheduled talks in Montreux.
For someone who is supposed to be well versed in the subtle arts of diplomacy, the UN's leading diplomat has proved himself to be remarkably naive when it comes to dealing with the treacherous world of Middle Eastern politics. For anyone who has followed closely Syria's brutal descent into full-scale civil war, Iran's fundamental objective has been to ensure at all costs the survival of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, its most important regional ally.
Thus the UN's requirement that Tehran accept the protocols laid down at Geneva 1 – to which Iran was not invited – and which call for Assad to stand down as part of the country's transition from Ba'athist dictatorship to democratic rule was always going to be hopelessly unrealistic.
As today's harrowing accounts of the Assad regime's systematic torture and mass killings of its opponents prove, neither Assad nor his Iranian supporters – who have provided his regime with the means to carry out such atrocities – are prepared to give any quarter when it comes to defending their interests. So long as they are concerned, this is a fight for survival, one which they are determined to win through force of arms, not the quiet repose of a Swiss conference room.
Nor should we forget that Islamist rebel groups such as the Nusra front are equally culpable of conducting similar horrific war crimes, such as the mass executions of captured regime fighters and the public beheading of rival militants.
More by Con Coughlin:
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The only realistic hope we can expect from this week's Geneva talks is that both sides in the conflict realise there has been enough bloodshed, and that the time has come to establish a ceasefire and bring the slaughter to a halt. But with Iran no longer able to influence the outcome, that prospect looks a lot more remote now than it did before the UN Sectretary-General embarked on his ill-considered diplomatic overture to Iran.
Furthermore, at a time when the UN's negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme are reaching a critical juncture (I still believe that Iran is only interested in getting the sanctions lifted, rather than dismantling its uranium enrichment programme), it is hard to have any confidence that Ban Ki-moon is the man to deliver a deal that will satisfy the West's concerns about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
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