The Syrian stalemate is pushing the outside powers to find a workable compromise before it is too late to climb out of the abyss. Word from Lebanon and France is that the Russians are “seduced” by the Lebanese Taif Agreement which ended the civil war, and are interested in a Syrian Taif.

This is very bad news for Syria. The Taif Accords in Lebanon ended the military confrontation between the Lebanese through a confessional power-sharing formula among the different sects and stopped the war. But it did not offer the country a basis for a stable and workable democracy. It is a system that inherently recreates crises and keeps the country in a perpetual civil war.

My former boss, the late prime minister Rafic Hariri, used to plead with the American ambassador in Beirut in 2003 for the Americans not to copy the Lebanese sectarian system in Iraq because it was not working. But this is exactly what Washington did. The political crisis that is crippling Iraq today is the natural outcome of a sectarian system compounded with meddling in its internal affairs by regional powers encouraged by a willing political leadership. A former Iraqi official complained recently that 10 years after the end of the war, Iraq still has only four hours of electricity a day. I pointed to him that political gridlock left Lebanon in total blackout this summer, 30 years after the end of its war.

Now this same receipe is being offered to the Syrians. Russian Middle East envoy and deputy foreign minister Mikhael Bogdanov told the French newspaper Le Figaro this week that Syria faces the “risk of Somalization," saying that “if the regime brutally collapses tomorrow, we need to do everything to avoid the disintegration of the central state.” Therefore, Russia “proposed to our Western partners the organization of a Taif conference,” similar to that which brought about the end of the civil war in Lebanon in 1990.