After meeting with Syrian opposition figures in Rome today, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the United States was sending $60 million in non-lethal aid to the opposition. That assistance, according to Kerry, “will strengthen the organizational capacity of the Syrian Opposition Coalition. It will help war torn communities be able to survive devastating situations with respect to sanitation, food delivery, medical care. It will speed the delivery of basic goods and services including security and education. It will help to initiate discussions with those who are providing for public order and for justice as the transition itself unfolds. And we will help the SNC, Free Syrian Army, and the civilian opposition to feed those in need and tend to the sick and the wounded.”
In other words, the Free Syrian Army is not going to get what it needs most to change, as Kerry puts it, Bashar al-Assad’s “calculation”—guns. Before the meeting, Obama administration officials had let on that the U.S., while still refusing to arm the opposition, was nonetheless going to train rebel units and provide all sorts of materiel, short of weapons, like “vehicles, communications equipment and night vision gear.” Maybe, as a State Department official told me recently, this is an aspect of the more active Syria policy that Kerry is not going to speak of publicly.
