The State Department offered a succinct judgment on Mr. Assad's hour-long speech, his first in six months: "His initiative is detached from reality, undermines the efforts of [U.N.] Joint Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi, and would only allow the regime to further perpetuate its bloody oppression of the Syrian people." After 22 months of protests and civil war in which his regime has steadily lost ground, Mr. Assad is offering the same hollow political formulas and slogans about terrorists that he has clung to all along.
The tragedy is that there is scant sign that Mr. Assad will be compelled to face reality any time soon. Despite their gains, Syria's rebels continue to lack the heavy weapons necessary to break the regime's hold over Damascus or to stop the artillery, missiles and planes Mr. Assad is using to pummel cities. With the United States and other Western governments refusing to help, recent reports have said that rebel arms supplies are drying up.
The Assad speech made clear that the ruler and his clique remain locked in that belief. But it also illuminated the fecklessness of U.S. policy. The same State Department statement that began by condemning Mr. Assad for undermining Mr. Brahimi concluded by saying that the Obama administration would continue to support the latter's initiative, along with the "framework for a political solution" that the dictator had just rejected. Like the Syrian regime, the administration has become impervious to fact or real-world developments.