The Hill News

Kofi Annan’s six-point plan for Syria, providing for a military withdrawal by Syrian forces by tomorrow, never had a chance of success. The reason for that is because of the wiggle room afforded to the Syrian government, which lost its legitimacy long ago.

Annan, the envoy of the United Nations and Arab League, should have known better after his experience with Saddam Hussein in February 1998, which resulted in a deal on the inspection of so-called presidential sites. I covered his peace mission to Baghdad as a reporter and was there when Annan returned to New York describing Saddam as a man he could “do business with.” (The deal with Saddam collapsed after the first (farcical) inspection.) Mercifully, Annan has refrained from describing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the same terms. But the issue of “sovereignty” that was so important for Baghdad (not to mention Moscow and Beijing) will doom the Annan plan in Damascus as well; the Syrian author! ities know that, short of an invasion, which would require U.N. authorization to be legal, the international community is obliged to deal with the Assad regime to obtain a negotiated solution.

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