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Eugene Michael Jones, editor of the Culture Wars Online Magazine from Indiana, has joined Press TV to discuss the upcoming Geneva conference on Syria.

- This Geneva II Conference was hyped up, there is a lot of riding on this conference so to speak. Why do you think that they are not even being able to fix a date?

- Because they do not know who the opposition is, or another way of saying is, they do not want to let the world know who the opposition is; because, I think, what you are talking about here, is not a group of Syrians who have a specific list of grievances that they can present and which could be negotiated, but rather you have an international group of basically hired guns, mercenaries, at the top, acting according to a totally destructive and alien philosophy and the foot soldiers are basically people recruited from the refugee camps, who are given an AK47, a 100 dollars a month and a packet of cigarettes.

Now, this is not a credible opposition. That is, I think the problem that they face.

- Well, speaking of which, then if this conference is even held, who is going to attend it from the side of the “opposition”? And can any agreement be even enforced?

- Well, the opposition was created by the United States, by Saudi Arabia and by Qatar. So they are the people who are the puppeteers and they will have to point the puppets to speak for them.

How can this happen if one of the first things that John Kerry does when he become secretary of state is refuse to give this people heavy weapons, because he does not trust them. So how are you going to have negotiations if the puppeteers do not trust the puppets? How is the other side supposed to trust them as representative of any significant group of the Syrian people?

- And yet these puppets, as you call them, are still getting funding, they are still getting some sort of arms to fight the government of Bashar al-Assad. That again takes away the incentive to come and sit on the negotiating table. Won’t you agree?

- Yes, I think that there was a sea change in world politics over September, over that weekend in September, when the Pope held the prayer vigil and then Obama decided to go with the Putin thing, and then [Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani showed up at the United Nations, and then Benjamin Netanyahu threw his hissy fit after that.

So it is a situation now, where they cannot win, but maybe the next strategy is just to create anarchy there so that Syria cannot pose any type of significant threat to Israel. That may be plan B.

- And very quickly if you can, do you think that would work?

- No!