Robert Ford, the just-retired former US ambassador to Syria, says that the Syrian war is grinding toward an intractable stalemate in part because the opposition has failed to unify around a single leadership against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Ford, who left Damascus in 2011 and spent the past three years trying to help the opposition become more coherent, told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on March 20 that a “huge amount of personal ambition and competition” among would-be replacements for Assad have hurt their cause “from the beginning.”

In his first major public appearance since retiring from the US State Department, Ford related, “The opposition needs to reassemble around a Syrian agenda first and foremost.” While the Syrian opposition agrees that Assad must go, Ford said, “They always get snagged up … over who should lead the process.”

Ford predicted that the United States would re-evaluate policy toward Syria in light of the failure of the Geneva talks to close the gap between the externally based opposition and the Assad government over a political transition. He assessed that the Barack Obama administration was unlikely to provide anti-aircraft weapons to the opposition because of concerns that they might proliferate and menace civilian aviation.