President Bashar Assad’s hopes are rising that he may be able to use the conference in Geneva to bolster the legitimacy of his regime

IF HISTORY is said to repeat itself first as tragedy then as farce, it seems all too probable that the peace conference on Syria that opened in Montreux this week before moving to Geneva on January 24th is destined to get it the other way round. Hopes that it will do much to bring an end to the three-year-old civil war are slim.

The farce was over an invitation on January 19th from Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary-general, asking Iran to take part in the first phase of the conference, which was then rescinded the next day. The horrified Syrian opposition delegation, which had itself agreed to come only at the last moment, said it would walk out unless Iran, a belligerent in the conflict, unequivocally accepted the road map towards a political transition sketched out in the communiqué ending a previous Geneva conference in June 2012. Acceptance of the communiqué is supposedly a condition for attending the present one.

Apparently with American encouragement, Mr Ban had held talks with Iran’s foreign minister, Muhammad Javad Zarif, that led him to believe that Iran was willing to accept that condition. When it balked, the invitation was duly withdrawn. The conference was back on, but the shambles had exposed the contradiction underlying it.

Neither the Syrian regime, which has sent a delegation led by its foreign minister, Walid Muallem, nor its other stalwart ally, Russia, a co-sponsor of the conference with America, has the slightest interest in its avowed purpose of establishing a transitional administration implicitly following Bashar Assad’s removal. Mr Muallem declared on January 22nd in a tub-thumping opening speech: “No one can grant or withdraw the legitimacy of the president …other than the Syrians themselves.”

Two days before, Mr Assad told Agence France Presse that the conference should be about fighting terrorism in Syria; it was “totally unrealistic” to suppose he would ever share power with the opposition, blithely adding that he was minded to run for another term as president later this year, if public opinion supported his candidacy. Russia’s foreign minister, the wily Sergei Lavrov, suggests sotto voce that his government has no particular loyalty to Mr Assad himself, and is looking only for a settlement that preserves the Syrian state and prevents a takeover by jihadists. But in practice Russia is doing all it can to help Mr Assad keep his grip on power.

According to a report on January 17th by Reuters, based on intelligence and arms-industry sources, Russia has stepped up its military aid to Mr Assad. Since December “dozens of Antonov-124s have been bringing in armoured vehicles, surveillance equipment, radars, electronic warfare systems, spare parts for helicopters, and various weapons including guided bombs for planes…Russian advisers and intelligence experts have been running observation UAVs [drones] around the clock to help Syrian forces track rebel positions… and carry out precision artillery and air force strikes against them”.

The contrast with America, which has blown hot and cold about arming the rebels it claims to support, is stark. While the rebels continue to get money and weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they have had little from America, as fears have grown that arms would find their way into the hands of groups with links to al-Qaeda, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Western diplomats justify their emphasis on diplomacy by saying “there is no military solution”, but the regime and its allies, Russia and Iran, think otherwise. A degree of military success in the past nine months, combined with divisions among the rebels (which broke out in December into bitter fighting between relatively moderate factions and the most extreme jihadists, leaving around 1,000 dead so far), has convinced Mr Assad that he can grind down his enemies into a terrorist rump.

Mr Assad has been playing his political cards with some skill. The deal brokered by Russia to remove his arsenal of chemical weapons enabled him to present his government as a partner in the project and thus to strengthen his claim to legitimacy. Emile Hokayem, an expert on Syria at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, says Mr Assad believes his strategy of portraying the rebels as jihadist terrorists who threaten both the region and the West is working, and that he will try to present himself as a bulwark against al-Qaeda and as a vital source of intelligence to the West. Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, argued last month that, compared with Syria becoming an al-Qaeda stronghold, Mr Assad was the lesser evil. Some way of doing business with him should, he reckoned, be quietly found.

America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, still insists that Mr Assad must go. But Mr Crocker’s view has gained ground. For Mr Assad this represents a triumph for a plan he has pursued since soon after the uprising began in 2011 of helping jihadists to dominate the opposition to him. His first such move was to free around 1,000 jihadists and al-Qaeda types from prison as part of a so-called amnesty. More recently, it has been reported that ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra are being financed by selling oil and gas from wells under their control through the regime. Rebels also say that regime forces have concentrated on attacking the more moderate factions, giving the jihadists a helping hand.

When the conference moves to Geneva on January 24th (after The Economist goes to press), the regime and opposition delegations will meet face-to-face under the chairmanship of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN’s special envoy to Syria. Officials of the Syrian government probably have no mandate to negotiate anything of substance bar the possibility of opening a few corridors for humanitarian relief and offering local ceasefires to let food and medicine into some of the most wretched areas, such as three suburbs of Damascus—Yarmouk, Moadamiya and Eastern Ghouta.

Mr Nice Guy after all

That too is designed to reinforce Mr Assad’s portrayal of himself as an essential partner, for under international law only a recognised government can grant access to UN or Red Cross aid workers. Should the rebels refuse Mr Assad’s proposal, he will vilify them as callous towards their suffering fellow citizens. The West can hardly reject what he may be offering, but by working with him they may bolster his regime.

A reminder of the risk of moral jeopardy in engaging with Mr Assad was a report issued just before the conference detailing photographic and documentary evidence of the systematic torture and killing of about 11,000 of his detainees. According to the report, drawn up by three prosecutors with experience of the tribunals concerning Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, most of the victims were young men held in custody between March 2011 and August last year. Sir Desmond de Silva, one of the authors, described the evidence as “documented industrial-scale killing”. Yet Mr Assad’s hopes are rising that his regime will soon be doing business with a more sympathetic West.