 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmad to discuss what's happening in Syria and how the peace process there is going to proceed or not proceed. Ajaz, the Syrian situation looks like with now the six-point plan of Kofi Ahmad that it can move to some kind of resolution if both sides agree. Do you think there is any willingness now because already Bashar al-Assad has said he is willing to accept this plan. But do you think there is any acceptance from the other side on this peace plan? Well, the NATO and Gulf Cooperation Council people have effectively already rejected the plan. On 1st April, the Friends of Turkey group of 83 countries that met in Istanbul, Friends of Syria that met in Istanbul basically have established a multimillion-dollar fund to provide armament for the so-called free Syrian army for fighters against the Bashar al-Assad government. The US has said that it will give non-lethal equipment to the fighters for fighting. So it will be Gulf Council provided weapons used with various kinds of equipment from the United States and so on. This is very interesting to me because you mentioned the Kofi Ahmad initiative. He was appointed by the UN and the Arab League. He is their representative. He is there and war, as they call it, on the 16th of February. He is confirmed on March 21st by the Security Council to which he had presented that plan. This March 21st. March 27th, Syria accepts the plan. The opposition does not. April 4th, Hillary Clinton and all of them get up in Istanbul and say, Hafiz al-Assad is not willing to accept this plan, although he accepted it, he is not acting on it and so on and so forth. You know there are two very interesting points here. One is of course that the peace plan itself that Kofi Anand put forward was virtually what the Russians wanted in the Security Council, which at that time the United States and the NATO as well as the Arab League did not accept that both sides should obey a ceasefire. Both sides should stop fighting and it should not mean that Bashar al-Assad steps down as the Arab League plan wanted. So, both these plans seem to be there in the Kofi Anand 6-point plan. It is interestingly none of these other parties, NATO and others, are saying outright rejection of the plan, but they are making the same condition that they did in the UN Security Council earlier, that it has to be virtually unilateral ceasefire for them to consider he is obeying the peace plan. Yes. I think they paid this price for getting China and Russia. In fact, they gave a sort of a face-saving device for China and Russia to come on board. This is also a non-binding. It is not a resolution. It is a statement, a declaration by the General Secretary with unanimous consent of the members of the Security Council. So, China and Russia have come on board. I am sure they knew that just as the US violated the NATO forces, the Gulf Cooperation Council violated the letter in spirit of the resolution on Libya, they were going to do the same with this one. So, in appearance they have accepted that. That is what I was saying, that the plan itself was approved by the Security Council on the 21st. A week later, Bashar al-Assad accepts it. Their boys don't. Four days later, this spectacular plan of $100 million worth of armament and this and that and so on and so forth. This is basically an attempt to make it appear as if there is a peace plan and then put the onus of not accepting the peace plan, even if that's not true in Bashar al-Assad. Their boys, their National Security Council people, Ghaliyun and so on, were there in that meeting. They have not accepted the plan. So, officially they say they have? Well, officially they have, but the fighting is going on. And they are saying that the onus for ceasefire has to be on both sides. The beauty of it is that they can sit in Paris and say, we have accepted the plan and the Syrian Army, so-called, can go on fighting and they say, well, we have no control over them. And at the same time, at the conference, Ghaliyun asked specifically for military aid for these people. So, the Saudis, the Gulf Council people, by committing that much money to give them arms, 10 days after the plan has been announced. The official is non-lethal equipment, whatever that means. No, only the Americans are going to give non-lethal, like nighttime vision goggles and things like that. But Qataris and the Gulf Council. 100 million worth of armament. That's Qataris, the Saudi Arabians, the Gulf Council essentially and the Qataris. If you look at what's happening on the ground in Syria, it does appear that Bashar al-Assad's forces seem to have regained control over some of the territories they had lost earlier or had been taken out due to whatever reasons. Maybe they are trying to appeal to the Arab League that they are actually observing some peace, been drawing. But it does appear that now the resistance in Homs has been broken and also in other places the resistance is actually being broken by the security forces of Syria. Do you think there is a change in the equilibrium on the ground? This is a reaction to that fact. Just what you just summarized. Yes, absolutely. Basically, their boys had been defeated and they cannot any longer pretend. You know, there has been a foreign intervention. They can no longer pretend and it could go on. Now they have to come out openly and fight a proxy war. You know, Jonathan Steele quite rightly says that Turkey is becoming a Honduras. You are going to have a contra war. These people are the Contras and they are giving them equipment so openly because they have been defeated. And now it's only with this and many more mercenaries will be flown in. So it will be essentially a non-Syrian fighting force by and large. And you know they are saying openly one of the officials apparently said to the Guardian that we are hoping that with this money more soldiers from the Syrian army will defect. And you have on the ground a very peculiar alliance of the Americans, the NATO countries generally, the Gulf Council people, Al Qaeda, Israel and all of them. The American administration itself has said that those bombings in Aleppo and Damascus were carried out by Al Qaeda. So Al Qaeda is being transplanted from Iraq to Syria. Also from Libya? Well yes, but I mean from Libya all kinds of people are being brought up. But you have a peculiar circumstance in which the Saudi royal family and the Al Qaeda are fighting on the same side. But if you look at militarily the situation, it doesn't look like that there is a possibility of anything but a contra kind of war that they can fight. And the possibility of a civil war moving to a position warfare which in the period might happen as far as Homs, Hamas were concerned. That seems to have gone. Look, I don't know where it is going. I really don't know where it is going. But my sense is that one possible scenario is that once they have got big fighting going on again, then they will say humanitarian intervention. You will recall that after the American resolution was basically defeated in the Security Council because of the Russian and Chinese veto, a few days after that Obama was asked if humanitarian intervention was off the table in Syria. He said no, there are no such plans but if necessary it can be done under the doctrine of international consent. Now this group of 83 is the international consent they will invoke if they wish to go in. The Turkish Foreign Minister is on record saying we ourselves are willing to intervene in Syria if our NATO allies so want. But it does appear that even Turkey is sort of not as gung-ho about entering militarily into Syria as it might have appeared two to three months back. Mr Erdogan in February 2011 said no question of NATO going into Libya. He said this is not a territory for NATO. 15th of March, less than a month later, he called for NATO intervention in Libya. What the Turks will do, you cannot say. But Syrian opposition itself has splintered, groups have walked out and saying that Muslim brotherhood is in total control and Ghalayun is just basically a figurehead. So it does appear that it's the unity of the Syrian opposition. You don't need any of it for if you're going to invade a country and destroy it. Of course if the NATO invades all this is of course doesn't really matter. The Syrian National Council reminds you of Iraq National Council of Ahmad Chalabi. It reminds you of Ahmad Jaleel's Libyan Transitional Council. These things are cooked up in order to do something. You don't need it. Of course we can't have a crystal ball but if I really look at what is happening in Syria now, one would say that the chance of military intervention temporarily is actually receded compared to what it was a two or two and a half months back. Would you agree with this or do you think that this is really very much open? You know, in our previous conversations over the last three or four months, I have always said that the Americans have taken such a strong position on the issue of removal of the Assad regime that they will find it very difficult to backtrack on it. One way or another they'll keep trying. It's impossible to say what form that will take. But their latest move seemed quite clear that this Kofi and Nan maneuver is simply a maneuver. That will go, I don't know. In the presidential election here in the United States, can Obama afford to look like a peace candidate? No, he has to be a war candidate. All of those Republicans breathing down within the last one week, all of them have called for invasion of Syria. So it's a very dicey moment. What form it will take, I do not know. But I do believe that one of the important objectives of the United States is to destroy these societies. So if you look at it, both Syria and Iran, Obama administration is locked in the United States, whatever may be his compulsion, selections or not, into a trajectory where it is very difficult to back out into anything else but either covert war or outright war. And that's where both these countries seem to be heading. That's right, that's right. What form it will take, I do not know. And I don't believe it is electoral pressures or Israeli lobby or any of these things. I think it is the very logic of where America now stands in relation to its own economy and its imperial design and its absolute determination to have total control of the globe's resources and deny them to China and Russia. That resource denial through direct control is now, I think, very much at the center of that policy. Which explains why they are taking the position that they are taking on Iran. But this also should in that case be a warning to Russia and China, which way they should go. Whether they have understood this or they are willing to go more out on a limb or go out and oppose the American system, I think to be seen. Yes, their strategy so far as I can read it is that at the end of the day, they come on board. Because they also need the Western capitalist world as much as, you know, it's a collaborative competition. That's the problem. In which the Americans have the upper hand. So they often succeed in dictating the terms of this collaborative competition. But beyond a certain point, you have to come on board. So it's still an open issue when and how this contradiction resolves itself. But it does appear that the Kofi Anan plan is more of a maneuver than a serious attempt at peace. And the other thing I would say is that what they have now done 10 days later appears to be preparing for a contrast dialogue. Thank you Ajaz. Let's watch what happens in Syria and Iran. I think this is going to be the next two hotspots for the globe as a whole. Thank you very much. Thanks.