UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan has reported that world powers agreed on a plan for a transition government in Syria based on mutual consent including members of the current government as a solution to the civil conflict raging in that country.

After a meeting of the Action Group on Syria in Geneva on Saturday, Annan admitted this process could take a whole year. Annan evaded direct questions about the perceived fate of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and responded that there were many in Syria’s conflict with blood on their hands.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted that Assad would never pass the “mutual consent” test because of the blood on his hands and must realise that his days are numbered.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that the Geneva documents contained nothing about imposed solutions.

“How exactly the work on a transition to a new stage is conducted will be decided by the Syrians themselves,” Lavrov said.

“There are no demands to exclude from this process any one group. This aspect had been present in many of our partners’ proposals. We have convinced them that this is unacceptable,” Lavrov said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi also stressed that “outsiders cannot make decisions for the Syrian people.”

The governments meeting in Geneva have pledged to apply leverage to the parties they support — in a coordinated way — so as to make them sit down at the negotiating table.

Whatever said and done, it is clear that the Action Group on Syria meeting, attended by the five permanent Security Council members and Arab League representatives, has not bridged US-Russian differences over Assad.

The US and its allies will continue to prepare for military intervention in Syria and look for ways to topple the Syrian regime outside the UN Security Council where Russia and China have used and will continue to use their veto power to pre-empt effective against the rulers of Damascus.

Russia will maintain its staunch support for Assad by calling for a government in Damascus that represents the will of the Syrian people.

Annan will continue his diplomatic mission by shuttling back and forth among the various parties involved but fail to produce anything meaningful.

Iran will continue to pump weapons and other forms of help to the Damascus regime. And the Syrian rulers will press ahead with their carnage with impunity until the world would be forced to act. True that history will not look favourably on leaders who failed to chart a strategy to end the bloodshed, but that seems to be of little concern to the powers that matter.