As long as the army remains loyal to Bashar, the rebels are unlikely to make much headway, although their continued ability to secure weapons through the Turkish border would plunge Syria into a protracted civil war.

If anybody thought that a change of talk in the Bush administration’s Iran policy would be enough to induce the “isolated” Tehran to give up its intransigence and toe the western line, the July 19 meeting proved him or her wrong. Before the Geneva meeting between Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the US sent feelers to Tehran.