Three specific problems emerge from this new American attitude to the Syrian opposition. The first is about the United States itself. The U.S. appears increasingly unsure about how it wants to respond to the Syrian uprising, and having changed its mind this week it will be seen by most people as an unreliable partner that can change its mind again and again. If it wants, correctly, to support opposition groups on the ground, why did it not do this from the start? It could have engaged with the SNC and assisted other groups inside Syria through the available entry points into Syria. Or, it could simply quietly provide more assistance to other groups than the SNC, without making a public spectacle of its erratic behavior.

The second problem is that any Syrian or Arab groups that the U.S. now publicly supports will be tainted as hand-picked agents of Washington, a status that is usually the kiss of death for most individuals or organizations in the Arab world, where public opinion still sees the U.S. and Israel as the two most serious threats to the Arab security. The Assad regime, Russia and many others will have a field day with any new opposition group coalition that emerges from the Qatar gathering, branding it as an American – and American-Israeli – proxy that is created and manipulated by Washington.

The third problem is that this smacks of yet another dimension of a neocolonial mindset and enterprise that still plagues the Middle East, when Western capitals play a leading role in defining which groups have legitimacy in the Arab world and which ones are left out of the picture. This contradicts an underlying theme of the Arab uprisings that continue to reverberate around the region, which is the renewed empowerment and agency of the Arab citizenry, and the firm anchorage of legitimacy in the hands of that citizenry, rather than in the hands of foreign powers and their hand-picked Arab elites.