"Handpicked by Hillary"

"...Despite the best Western attempts to confer ‘legitimacy’ and a ‘representative’ role upon the SNC, the SNC’s increasingly apparent impotence has led to some pro-interventionists turning their admiring gazes towards the FSA instead. This, after all, is what Time magazine called ‘the main actor in a revolution that is growing nastier by the day’. All the West has to do is to replace the FSA’s limited supply of handguns with bigger and better weaponry, it is assumed, and Assad will fall. This was the argument of US senator John McCain a few weeks ago. He has since been joined by former US foreign-policy adviser, Elliott Abrams: ‘Directly or indirectly’, he wrote in the National Review, ‘the next step is to provide plenty of money and arms, training, and intelligence to the Free Syrian Army and other opponents of the Assads’.
Again, this is the political equivalent of alchemy. In their desire to simplify the Syrian situation, to turn it into a stage on which to appear to be doing something right and good, Western politicians and commentators are now transforming the FSA into something it is not: an organised, centralised fighting force with coherent objectives.
Set up in Turkey in July last year as a refuge for defectors from the Syrian army, its leader - former Syrian airforce colonel Riyad al-Asaad - has tried to paint it as a powerful, organised 40,000-strong fighting force. The reality is somewhat different, though. It is not so much a centrally controlled, organised army as a franchise in which various small groups of fighters, armed largely with handguns, fight guerrilla battles with Assad’s well-equipped, 200,000-strong armed forces. As Mark Lynch put it in Foreign Policy: ‘The “Free Syrian Army” remains something of a fiction, a convenient mailbox for a diverse, unorganised collection of local fighting groups.’
So while certain commentators and politicians in Europe and the US can talk blithely of providing the Syrian opposition, in particular the FSA, with weapons and training, the actuality of who is to be armed and trained remains as nebulous as the composition of the FSA. Indeed, one report presents the FSA-branded opposition as a barely affiliated mish-mash of people potentially opposed to one another: ‘Some are career, many are young conscripts, others simply civilians who know how to handle a gun. Some are secular liberals, a few are hardline Islamists who fought parallel, if not alongside, al-Qaeda in neighbouring Iraq.’ One such post-Iraq fighter, a local Sunni Salafist leader known as Abu Annas al-Homsi, reckoned that Colonel Asaad represented just 20 per cent of the so-called FSA fighters on the ground. Moreover, the sheer diversity of those fighting under the seeming banner of the FSA, from the secular to jihadist, shows just how politically incoherent the FSA is. What unites these fighters beyond the FSA name and a desire to get rid of Bashar al-Assad is unclear..."