There is no solution in Syria other than a peace deal Meanwhile, in Geneva, this is the very message that the representatives of President Bashar al-Assad will be trying to send to their western counterparts: you are better off with me than our mutual sworn enemies. Mr Assad wants to make the focus of the peace talks scheduled for this week the "fight against terror," setting his own struggle to stay in power in the context of the "war" declared by President George W. Bush against al-Qaeda more than a decade ago. It is a clever thing to do, and there are many calls in the West that he is right. Whatever the crimes he has committed, the argument goes, our national interests dictate that we bite our tongue and join forces against a common foe. Western diplomats though, briefing journalists over the weekend, were adamant that this is not the goal of "Geneva 2" and cannot be. The opposition - to the extent that they speak for rebels on the ground in the first place - will only attend if the focus of negotiations is the agreement reached 18 months ago at "Geneva 1" that there should be a transitional government. If attention is turned away from that, they will walk out. So in that sense, the call to change focus is meaningless, since there will be no negotiations if that happens. Moreover, it is hard to see what "co-operation" on terror there can be without a peace deal that is acceptable to the non-al-Qaeda opposition, who are currently the people attacking the militants with most ferocity. It is not clear what help an embattled Assad regime, which cannot even secure its own capital, can offer the West. Mr Assad may well be referring to the halcyon days when he participated in the American rendition programme for militant operatives, but that is now well in the past: no-one now is going to transfer suspects to Syrian jails. More people now are looking at the support Mr Assad himself gave jihadis when he was on the other side, helping al-Qaeda in Iraq in its fight against the American presence in the Middle East. How reliable an ally is Mr Assad likely to be in any conflict? The West could help Mr Assad if it wanted to. It could urge Turkey to choke off rebel supply routes to the north of Syria. But with Al-Qaeda also being supplied from its support base in Iraq, that is only further going to strengthen the militants. It is not going to end the war: there seems little likelihood that Mr Assad is ever going to reclaim the north of his country, still less establish the rule of law in al-Qaeda-controlled strongholds. Only a government that has the support of the dominant Sunni population is ever going to be able to do that. And if the West does turn its back on the opposition, that will only further lend weight to the jihadists' recruiting arguments that Sunni Muslims cannot get a fair hearing; then the blow-back will be all the worse. For all of us, there is no solution other than a peace deal. How that is going to come about is another matter.