As Turkey's incursion into northern Syria blatantly uses ISIS as a pretext to primarily attack the Kurds instead, it's increasingly clear that Ankara is blackmailing Washington: since we don't forgive your unwillingness to extradite Fetullah Gulen (the cleric blamed for masterminding the July 15 putsch), if you still want us in NATO and not fall outright into Russia's orbit, we can't have you nitpick how we press our legitimate security interests in Syria, especially vis-à-vis the Kurds.
That sounds like just the kind of cynical deal Erdogan would have concluded (admittedly roughly) with Putin when they met at the Kremlin August 9. The common denominator is unmistakable: play the US like a cheap fiddle, using Washington's fear of loss of influence in the region and broader peacemaking credibility worldwide, to bamboozle it into doing Ankara's and Moscow's respective authoritarian biddings.
So Obama is looking more like the naive fool in the region, almost like the "JV team" he once derided ISIS as: just as the Russians have extracted from him the price of non-interference with their brutal bombings of the opposition, so the Turks have now extracted the price of plausible deniability when it comes to betraying Syrian Kurdish aspirations.
It all works just fine for the dictators: they get to whack the malcontents they want to whack - provided they've agreed on how to divvy up the hit jobs - and they can count on the good ole US of A to bear the humanitarian burden of cleaning up the mess, even as they can still keep just enough facade of being a "partner" of America to wash their own bloodied hands when the dirty work is finished.
It's hardly a wonder the Iranians have been so fired up against US naval patrols lately: the Shia jihadists smell the stench of a weakness borne of a deep sense of confusion over just what in the world the US mission has become. And of course it's the same with the Chinese: Beijing's aggressively uncompromising arrogance towards its smaller neighbors these days isn't ultimately about China's evolving relationship with them - it's about proving their association with Uncle Sam is the root of their insecurity.
If this trend persists, before long America's remaining undemocratic allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, have to wonder just why on earth they're still deferring to Washington's preferences and prejudices. And even democracies with firm sense of national interest and unflinching autonomy - think India - will draw closer to the US for purely utilitarian reasons, not humanitarian ones.
Shame, just a shame...America has become the timid sheriff who relies on the local gangster bosses to keep their neighborhoods relatively orderly (or simply from becoming even more chaotic)...if not even the toothless judge in a mob-ruled society whose verdicts are valued only for the moral certification they give the oligarchs.
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Abandoning Syrian regime change, Turkey takes its own bite of Syria
Having given up overthrowing Assad, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has wasted no time seizing what territorial leverage he still can in Syria with a powerful incursion to retake the ISIS border stronghold of Jarabulus.
Jarabulus is a vantage point on the upper Euphrates in its descent from the Anatolian highlands towards Mesopotamia, and the operation is appropriately dubbed "Euphrates Shield": by securing the river in this border sector, the Turkish and Turkish-supported Syrian rebel forces which comprise the expedition will be in a position to threaten further Kurdish territorial gains against ISIS - under the convenient pretext of fighting ISIS.
This is Turkey's response to the recent capture from ISIS of Manbij, further south in northeastern Aleppo province, by the Kurdish YPG militia-dominated, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). As the coalition effort to clear ISIS from the north of the province intensifies, Ankara is jockeying for a slice of the action, with the imperative of preventing the SDF from linking up the main Syrian Kurdish federation, predominantly along the Turkish border east of the Euphrates, with the small Kurdish enclave in the far northwest corner of Aleppo province (also bordering Turkey).
Strangely, this is the effective proxy war between the Pentagon and the CIA: the former supports the Kurdish-Arab rebel SDF while the latter backs the "moderate" rebel coalition of Arab groups such as Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Ahrar al-Sham alongside Turkic-speaking outfits like the Sultan Murad Brigade and Nour al-Din al-Zinki.
For the time being, US airpower and probably special forces are participating in the Turkish anti-ISIS campaign around Jarabulus, meaning that Langley has one-upped the Pentagon into at least partly appeasing Ankara. President Obama himself has doubtless concluded that if he wants Turkey to remain in NATO (i.e. not drift fully into Russia's orbit), he must make at least this token concession of legitimate national interest to Mr. Erdogan. It remains to be seen, though, just how he'll balance the two - the Turks versus the Kurds - as both want a role in liberating northern Aleppo province and thereby shaping its post-ISIS future.
The other wild card obviously is the Assad regime. While unsurprisingly protesting the Turkish incursion, Damascus can't do much about it: it needs to play off Turkey against the Kurds to maximize its own position at the bargaining table against the rebels. While Assad wouldn't welcome a longer Turkish presence in Syria any more than he'd recognize the Kurdish federation, he perfectly understands it's a reasonable price to pay for Erdogan's assent to keep his rump of the core of western Syria intact.
Jarabulus is a vantage point on the upper Euphrates in its descent from the Anatolian highlands towards Mesopotamia, and the operation is appropriately dubbed "Euphrates Shield": by securing the river in this border sector, the Turkish and Turkish-supported Syrian rebel forces which comprise the expedition will be in a position to threaten further Kurdish territorial gains against ISIS - under the convenient pretext of fighting ISIS.
This is Turkey's response to the recent capture from ISIS of Manbij, further south in northeastern Aleppo province, by the Kurdish YPG militia-dominated, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). As the coalition effort to clear ISIS from the north of the province intensifies, Ankara is jockeying for a slice of the action, with the imperative of preventing the SDF from linking up the main Syrian Kurdish federation, predominantly along the Turkish border east of the Euphrates, with the small Kurdish enclave in the far northwest corner of Aleppo province (also bordering Turkey).
Strangely, this is the effective proxy war between the Pentagon and the CIA: the former supports the Kurdish-Arab rebel SDF while the latter backs the "moderate" rebel coalition of Arab groups such as Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Ahrar al-Sham alongside Turkic-speaking outfits like the Sultan Murad Brigade and Nour al-Din al-Zinki.
For the time being, US airpower and probably special forces are participating in the Turkish anti-ISIS campaign around Jarabulus, meaning that Langley has one-upped the Pentagon into at least partly appeasing Ankara. President Obama himself has doubtless concluded that if he wants Turkey to remain in NATO (i.e. not drift fully into Russia's orbit), he must make at least this token concession of legitimate national interest to Mr. Erdogan. It remains to be seen, though, just how he'll balance the two - the Turks versus the Kurds - as both want a role in liberating northern Aleppo province and thereby shaping its post-ISIS future.
The other wild card obviously is the Assad regime. While unsurprisingly protesting the Turkish incursion, Damascus can't do much about it: it needs to play off Turkey against the Kurds to maximize its own position at the bargaining table against the rebels. While Assad wouldn't welcome a longer Turkish presence in Syria any more than he'd recognize the Kurdish federation, he perfectly understands it's a reasonable price to pay for Erdogan's assent to keep his rump of the core of western Syria intact.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Syrian conflict shifts, but Axis of Fatima has essentially won
Iran's abrupt eviction of the Russian air contingent at its Hamadan air base barely a week after the announcement of the groundbreaking collaboration by the Axis of Fatima is now being disclosed by Tehran as merely the end of a one-time usage, at its own behest, of the vital facility.
Apparently, the bombers were originally called in at the joint request of the Syrian regime and its Iranian benefactors both to conduct actual heavy strikes and, even more to the point, to make a strong show of force against the insurgents led by the jihadists of Al Nusra Front in the decisive standoff at Aleppo.
Having achieved a great physical and psychological impact which must have played a role in Turkey's about-face regarding Assad, however, Russia got a little giddy: its media went overboard trumpeting the new, uniquely privileged use of Iranian runways as evidence that the nation's great power status had dramatically been elevated. Such American-style hubris - which Putin himself apparently failed to rein in - had to be severely reprimanded.
While it's been pointed out that Iran's historic suspicions of Russia played a role in a rising popular backlash against the bomber deployment, the Shiite Islamic regime clearly had a much more immediate consideration: keeping itself in the driver's seat of the Syrian conflict, which it can never concede to an extra-regional Christian power, given that it's always posed it as a holy war (indeed, its own jihad) against the Salafists who would murder all the adherents of Ali.
That's in keeping with Iran's long-term ambition to spread Shiism across the Middle East to challenge the millennial Sunni supremacy: no hint whatsoever of subservience or vassalage to a non-Muslim power could be tolerated.
Despite the embarrassing spat, both Iran and Russia have gotten what they want in Erdogan's reversal over Assad's potential role in a Syrian transition, which came just in the nick of time on Saturday, August 20. This diminishes the political and diplomatic price they'd otherwise pay with such a public falling-out (however limited).
In the two weeks prior to Turkey's concession, with the government siege of Aleppo having been breached by jihadists spearheaded by the former Al Nusra Front, Russian and Syrian warplanes ruthlessly escalated their bombardment of the rebel-held eastern part of the city, ultimately exacting such a heavy direct and indirect civilian toll - including the now-infamous injury of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh and the death of his brother - that probably tens of thousands of additional residents have vacated it.
In this context, Damascus and Tehran saw fit to call in an even heavier array of Russian firepower in the form of Tupolev Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and advanced Sukhoi Su-35 fighter-bombers based out of Iran: their immediate mission was to take advantage of the shorter distance to Syria to pound both rebel and ISIS supply lines, thus pressuring the former's positions at Aleppo and blunting any opportunistic thrusts by the latter to take advantage of reshuffled regime manpower.
As of a week ago, when Russia announced its new bomber deployment in Iran, this first task had effectively been accomplished: the reinforced pro-regime troops were on the offensive to gradually wrest back the corridor they had lost to Al Nusra in southwestern Aleppo in the first week of August, if still unable to consolidate major gains. More significantly, with the existing tactical Russian and regime airstrikes now blasting the eastern rebel sector's support infrastructure to rubble, there'd soon be a lot less Aleppo left for the rebel-jihadist alliance to save - and even less so once enough additional civilians cleared out to run for their lives to make an all-out saturation bombardment by the Iranian-based Tu-22's feasible. With the threat of such fully-loaded Tuploevs flying such a shorter distance to rain wholesale destruction on both the east of the city and the urban jihadist positions in the southwest, Turkey could see the writing on the wall.
At that point, Tehran must have decided to throw Ankara a juicy bone: agree to Assad's role in a transitional government, and we'll cut the Russian heavyweights out of the region with a sharp rebuke to the Orthodox Christian superpower. Such a proposal would have been music to Mr. Erdogan's Islamist ears - and just the kind of deal which conveniently suits Turkish Sunni Islamists and the Shia fundamentalist regime of Iran alike.
With the Russians having been put in their place by Iran to Turkey's satisfaction, the continuing fight at Aleppo is itself becoming subsumed in a broader dance of triangular Turkish-Iranian-Syrian diplomacy. As Assad's forces tentatively retake portions of the jihadist corridor that purported to relieve the government siege of the rebel east (and even partially blockade the regime-held west itself), the Turks have stepped up their activity further east: with the priority of preventing a Kurdish statelet in northern Syria, they're far less keen on Al Nusra victory at Aleppo, giving the Axis of Fatima a much-needed breather in its central struggle to keep Assad viable.
Instead, Ankara's Syrian intervention is now squarely aimed at the Kurds: its shelling of ISIS around the recently US-backed Kurd-liberated town of Manbij is clearly laced with a threat to the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose People's Protection Units (YPG) militia so happened to be hit as well: you better behave or we won't mind making you collateral damage in our legitimate fight against Daesh.
This comes as the YPG has elsewhere liquidated the pro-regime resistance pocket of Hasakah: Assad's outpost there in the far northeast, which never really stood a chance, at least gave him the opportunity to demonstrate to Erdogan that his own opposition to Kurdish autonomy is consistent with Turkey's policy of maintaining Syrian territorial integrity for its own Kurdish problem's sake.
The YPG's links to the infamous Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is still waging a low-intensity guerrilla war against Ankara across the Turkish border from northeastern Syria, guarantees that Erdogan will continue to use a stepped-up campaign against ISIS mainly to contain the emergent Northern Syrian Federation modeled on the longstanding Kurdish autonomous federations which have existed in northern Iraq since the 1990s. As before, Turkish-backed "moderate" rebels will do Ankara's bidding: still implacably opposed to Assad, they'll now have to settle for serving Erdogan by putting an acceptable Syrian - but not Kurdish - face on his influence in the Kurdish-ISIS contested zone vis-à-vis Damascus.
Going forward, these developments point to a major fluid shift in the Syrian conflict: as Assad's core position is stabilized, the question now turns to just how the vast tracts of the country he doesn't control will be divvied up - and that of course includes the fate of both ISIS and the Kurds. While Turkey and Iran - with their new rapprochement that's followed and possibly already exceeded the Turkish thaw with Russia - would appear to be the decisive actors, Moscow retains significant leverage and will seek to maximize its efficacy.
Though the specifics will have to play out over the course of more years yet, the Axis of Fatima has essentially won. Moscow and Tehran have for practical purposes secured their foothold on the Levantine Mediterranean coast: in this objective, which the former has taken care to prevent the latter from expanding, they are increasingly untouchable. Meanwhile, the US-NATO-Sunni coalition's once maximalist goal of regime change and regional hegemony through a pipeline from the Persian Gulf to Europe through Syria and Turkey (thus circumventing Russia) has been thwarted: even if Russia can't make Assad whole, it can easily live with his strategically critical rump because it will have snatched a much bigger prize, namely Turkey, from Washington's clutch.
Apparently, the bombers were originally called in at the joint request of the Syrian regime and its Iranian benefactors both to conduct actual heavy strikes and, even more to the point, to make a strong show of force against the insurgents led by the jihadists of Al Nusra Front in the decisive standoff at Aleppo.
Having achieved a great physical and psychological impact which must have played a role in Turkey's about-face regarding Assad, however, Russia got a little giddy: its media went overboard trumpeting the new, uniquely privileged use of Iranian runways as evidence that the nation's great power status had dramatically been elevated. Such American-style hubris - which Putin himself apparently failed to rein in - had to be severely reprimanded.
While it's been pointed out that Iran's historic suspicions of Russia played a role in a rising popular backlash against the bomber deployment, the Shiite Islamic regime clearly had a much more immediate consideration: keeping itself in the driver's seat of the Syrian conflict, which it can never concede to an extra-regional Christian power, given that it's always posed it as a holy war (indeed, its own jihad) against the Salafists who would murder all the adherents of Ali.
That's in keeping with Iran's long-term ambition to spread Shiism across the Middle East to challenge the millennial Sunni supremacy: no hint whatsoever of subservience or vassalage to a non-Muslim power could be tolerated.
Despite the embarrassing spat, both Iran and Russia have gotten what they want in Erdogan's reversal over Assad's potential role in a Syrian transition, which came just in the nick of time on Saturday, August 20. This diminishes the political and diplomatic price they'd otherwise pay with such a public falling-out (however limited).
In the two weeks prior to Turkey's concession, with the government siege of Aleppo having been breached by jihadists spearheaded by the former Al Nusra Front, Russian and Syrian warplanes ruthlessly escalated their bombardment of the rebel-held eastern part of the city, ultimately exacting such a heavy direct and indirect civilian toll - including the now-infamous injury of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh and the death of his brother - that probably tens of thousands of additional residents have vacated it.
In this context, Damascus and Tehran saw fit to call in an even heavier array of Russian firepower in the form of Tupolev Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and advanced Sukhoi Su-35 fighter-bombers based out of Iran: their immediate mission was to take advantage of the shorter distance to Syria to pound both rebel and ISIS supply lines, thus pressuring the former's positions at Aleppo and blunting any opportunistic thrusts by the latter to take advantage of reshuffled regime manpower.
As of a week ago, when Russia announced its new bomber deployment in Iran, this first task had effectively been accomplished: the reinforced pro-regime troops were on the offensive to gradually wrest back the corridor they had lost to Al Nusra in southwestern Aleppo in the first week of August, if still unable to consolidate major gains. More significantly, with the existing tactical Russian and regime airstrikes now blasting the eastern rebel sector's support infrastructure to rubble, there'd soon be a lot less Aleppo left for the rebel-jihadist alliance to save - and even less so once enough additional civilians cleared out to run for their lives to make an all-out saturation bombardment by the Iranian-based Tu-22's feasible. With the threat of such fully-loaded Tuploevs flying such a shorter distance to rain wholesale destruction on both the east of the city and the urban jihadist positions in the southwest, Turkey could see the writing on the wall.
At that point, Tehran must have decided to throw Ankara a juicy bone: agree to Assad's role in a transitional government, and we'll cut the Russian heavyweights out of the region with a sharp rebuke to the Orthodox Christian superpower. Such a proposal would have been music to Mr. Erdogan's Islamist ears - and just the kind of deal which conveniently suits Turkish Sunni Islamists and the Shia fundamentalist regime of Iran alike.
With the Russians having been put in their place by Iran to Turkey's satisfaction, the continuing fight at Aleppo is itself becoming subsumed in a broader dance of triangular Turkish-Iranian-Syrian diplomacy. As Assad's forces tentatively retake portions of the jihadist corridor that purported to relieve the government siege of the rebel east (and even partially blockade the regime-held west itself), the Turks have stepped up their activity further east: with the priority of preventing a Kurdish statelet in northern Syria, they're far less keen on Al Nusra victory at Aleppo, giving the Axis of Fatima a much-needed breather in its central struggle to keep Assad viable.
Instead, Ankara's Syrian intervention is now squarely aimed at the Kurds: its shelling of ISIS around the recently US-backed Kurd-liberated town of Manbij is clearly laced with a threat to the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose People's Protection Units (YPG) militia so happened to be hit as well: you better behave or we won't mind making you collateral damage in our legitimate fight against Daesh.
This comes as the YPG has elsewhere liquidated the pro-regime resistance pocket of Hasakah: Assad's outpost there in the far northeast, which never really stood a chance, at least gave him the opportunity to demonstrate to Erdogan that his own opposition to Kurdish autonomy is consistent with Turkey's policy of maintaining Syrian territorial integrity for its own Kurdish problem's sake.
The YPG's links to the infamous Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is still waging a low-intensity guerrilla war against Ankara across the Turkish border from northeastern Syria, guarantees that Erdogan will continue to use a stepped-up campaign against ISIS mainly to contain the emergent Northern Syrian Federation modeled on the longstanding Kurdish autonomous federations which have existed in northern Iraq since the 1990s. As before, Turkish-backed "moderate" rebels will do Ankara's bidding: still implacably opposed to Assad, they'll now have to settle for serving Erdogan by putting an acceptable Syrian - but not Kurdish - face on his influence in the Kurdish-ISIS contested zone vis-à-vis Damascus.
Going forward, these developments point to a major fluid shift in the Syrian conflict: as Assad's core position is stabilized, the question now turns to just how the vast tracts of the country he doesn't control will be divvied up - and that of course includes the fate of both ISIS and the Kurds. While Turkey and Iran - with their new rapprochement that's followed and possibly already exceeded the Turkish thaw with Russia - would appear to be the decisive actors, Moscow retains significant leverage and will seek to maximize its efficacy.
Though the specifics will have to play out over the course of more years yet, the Axis of Fatima has essentially won. Moscow and Tehran have for practical purposes secured their foothold on the Levantine Mediterranean coast: in this objective, which the former has taken care to prevent the latter from expanding, they are increasingly untouchable. Meanwhile, the US-NATO-Sunni coalition's once maximalist goal of regime change and regional hegemony through a pipeline from the Persian Gulf to Europe through Syria and Turkey (thus circumventing Russia) has been thwarted: even if Russia can't make Assad whole, it can easily live with his strategically critical rump because it will have snatched a much bigger prize, namely Turkey, from Washington's clutch.
Monday, August 22, 2016
As Turkey finally blinks, Russia pulls bombers from Iran
Barely a week after launching its first airstrikes from Iran, Russia has pulled its bombers from the base.
This is probably because Turkey has apparently blinked at long last, if only partially: Assad, says prime minister Binali Yıldırım, can indeed play a role in a political transition, even though he can't have any part in Syria's long-term political rearrangement. For a regime that's staked its entire foreign policy credibility on getting rid of the hated dictator in Damascus, this marks a major admission of defeat:
That debacle can yet be salvaged: Turkey can effectively lock down the insurgents' existing lines at Aleppo and also secure the jihadist stronghold of Idlib province. To do so, however, it must somehow convince the remaining Syrian revolutionary resistance and whatever moderate Islamist opposition groups would listen that at this point, their only alternative to talking with Assad on the latter's own terms is complete destruction in the cauldron of Aleppo, however long this might take or how costly they make it for the regime and its Iranian-sponsored allies.
In the prior two and a half weeks since the Al Nusra-led rebels broke the Syrian government siege of Aleppo, the Axis of Fatima unsurprisingly retaliated by reducing the rebel sector of Aleppo to rubble; both Russian and Syrian regime warplanes systematically targeted pro-rebel civilian infrastructure in the eastern part of the city to accelerate the exodus of noncombatants and isolate the jihadists and remaining diehard revolutionaries, paving the way for them to eventually be annihilated with saturation strikes by the heavy bombers Moscow deployed to Iran.
Bluntly, Ankara simply ran out of cards. A rebel victory at Aleppo now wouldn't be one it can leverage politically, because neither it nor the US can openly throw their lot behind Al Qaeda and Taliban-style jihadists that want an Islamic emirate. But even worse for Turkey, with Assad's troops now battling the Kurds in northeastern Syria and Assad's air force buzzing pro-Kurdish US jets, Damascus is presenting Mr. Erdogan with a choice: either help us end the Aleppo stalemate or we won't mind ceding autonomy to the Kurds that you so fear and despise.
In fact, all indications are that Putin's much-anticipated meeting with Erdogan back on August 9 has been fruitful: Russo-Turkish relations are so good now that some speculate that the US has already removed its 90 nuclear warheads from Incirlik Air Base, and at least one leaked report has even said that Ankara might actually give Russian warplanes access to that longtime regional stronghold.
By bombing and attacking Kurdish peshmerga, Assad too is trying to ingratiate himself with Erdogan and win some rapport with his erstwhile nemesis that the Americans are still clearly less willing to earn. That's on top of intensive shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Tehran: their foreign ministers have met twice in the wake of the Putin-Erdogan summit, as if taking their cues from the Russo-Turkish détente (which is probably effectively the case).
The Axis of Fatima is now on the verge of scoring a massive diplomatic coup: wresting once-secular Turkey from the grip of Saudi and Gulf oil money-fueled Wahhabism that has for so long used a shady alliance with the US defense-intelligence establishment to further its anti-Western, anti-secular, and quite frankly anti-democratic aims in the region with heavy Western support. One must wonder how the deep state inside the Beltway will lash out to compensate for the loss.
They have Hillary Clinton as their preferred war candidate, for sure. But the CIA and Pentagon are losing their proxy war against Fatima now - and they're running out of time to somehow reverse Obama's strategic passivity that has put Putin in the driver's seat.
With Turkish-backed rebels lining up ever more obviously (if still implicitly) with reactivated regime troops and airpower in the north and northeast of Syria to contain Kurdish advances, the potentially explosive situation of a proxy war between the US and Turkey isn't even out of the question anymore. Doubtless this is Assad's way of reasserting sovereignty on his own territory at a time when the whole US-led regime change project is coming apart at the seams, and he's conveniently putting out feelers for teaming up with a vindictive Erdogan who's ever more openly defying the American and Saudi overlords who have been blackmailing and bribing him for years.
The more that Russia and Iran (and eventually Iraq too) cozy up to Turkey, and the more Ankara reciprocates, the more likely that an Assad-Erdogan rapprochement decisively shuts out US and Saudi designs on the Levant once and for all. The Axis of Fatima will then have taken its rival US-led alliance to the cleaners.
This is probably because Turkey has apparently blinked at long last, if only partially: Assad, says prime minister Binali Yıldırım, can indeed play a role in a political transition, even though he can't have any part in Syria's long-term political rearrangement. For a regime that's staked its entire foreign policy credibility on getting rid of the hated dictator in Damascus, this marks a major admission of defeat:
“He has the blood of 500,000 people on his hands,” Yıldırım has said, referring to al-Assad. “Will Syria be able to carry this burden? Today both the U.S. and Russia see that in the long run it is not possible. But for a transition [government], it is possible to sit and talk. It is obvious that, whether we like it or not, al-Assad is an actor.”Just the day earlier, the Turkish foreign minister was still insisting that Ankara hadn't changed its hardline stance on Assad's fate:
Foreign Minister Cavusoglu also claimed that Turkey does not support Assad staying in power for a short period such as six months, which was claimed in the past. "Assad must go immediately."Quite an embarrassment, one must say: it shows just how monumentally humiliating it is for Turkey to concede the scale of the debacle of its whole Syrian misadventure and miscalculation.
That debacle can yet be salvaged: Turkey can effectively lock down the insurgents' existing lines at Aleppo and also secure the jihadist stronghold of Idlib province. To do so, however, it must somehow convince the remaining Syrian revolutionary resistance and whatever moderate Islamist opposition groups would listen that at this point, their only alternative to talking with Assad on the latter's own terms is complete destruction in the cauldron of Aleppo, however long this might take or how costly they make it for the regime and its Iranian-sponsored allies.
In the prior two and a half weeks since the Al Nusra-led rebels broke the Syrian government siege of Aleppo, the Axis of Fatima unsurprisingly retaliated by reducing the rebel sector of Aleppo to rubble; both Russian and Syrian regime warplanes systematically targeted pro-rebel civilian infrastructure in the eastern part of the city to accelerate the exodus of noncombatants and isolate the jihadists and remaining diehard revolutionaries, paving the way for them to eventually be annihilated with saturation strikes by the heavy bombers Moscow deployed to Iran.
Bluntly, Ankara simply ran out of cards. A rebel victory at Aleppo now wouldn't be one it can leverage politically, because neither it nor the US can openly throw their lot behind Al Qaeda and Taliban-style jihadists that want an Islamic emirate. But even worse for Turkey, with Assad's troops now battling the Kurds in northeastern Syria and Assad's air force buzzing pro-Kurdish US jets, Damascus is presenting Mr. Erdogan with a choice: either help us end the Aleppo stalemate or we won't mind ceding autonomy to the Kurds that you so fear and despise.
In fact, all indications are that Putin's much-anticipated meeting with Erdogan back on August 9 has been fruitful: Russo-Turkish relations are so good now that some speculate that the US has already removed its 90 nuclear warheads from Incirlik Air Base, and at least one leaked report has even said that Ankara might actually give Russian warplanes access to that longtime regional stronghold.
By bombing and attacking Kurdish peshmerga, Assad too is trying to ingratiate himself with Erdogan and win some rapport with his erstwhile nemesis that the Americans are still clearly less willing to earn. That's on top of intensive shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Tehran: their foreign ministers have met twice in the wake of the Putin-Erdogan summit, as if taking their cues from the Russo-Turkish détente (which is probably effectively the case).
The Axis of Fatima is now on the verge of scoring a massive diplomatic coup: wresting once-secular Turkey from the grip of Saudi and Gulf oil money-fueled Wahhabism that has for so long used a shady alliance with the US defense-intelligence establishment to further its anti-Western, anti-secular, and quite frankly anti-democratic aims in the region with heavy Western support. One must wonder how the deep state inside the Beltway will lash out to compensate for the loss.
They have Hillary Clinton as their preferred war candidate, for sure. But the CIA and Pentagon are losing their proxy war against Fatima now - and they're running out of time to somehow reverse Obama's strategic passivity that has put Putin in the driver's seat.
With Turkish-backed rebels lining up ever more obviously (if still implicitly) with reactivated regime troops and airpower in the north and northeast of Syria to contain Kurdish advances, the potentially explosive situation of a proxy war between the US and Turkey isn't even out of the question anymore. Doubtless this is Assad's way of reasserting sovereignty on his own territory at a time when the whole US-led regime change project is coming apart at the seams, and he's conveniently putting out feelers for teaming up with a vindictive Erdogan who's ever more openly defying the American and Saudi overlords who have been blackmailing and bribing him for years.
The more that Russia and Iran (and eventually Iraq too) cozy up to Turkey, and the more Ankara reciprocates, the more likely that an Assad-Erdogan rapprochement decisively shuts out US and Saudi designs on the Levant once and for all. The Axis of Fatima will then have taken its rival US-led alliance to the cleaners.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
25 years later: post-Soviet Russia's lesson for democracy
The August 19-21, 1991 coup in which communist hardliners seized the Kremlin from Mikhail Gorbachev in a desperate attempt to prevent the USSR from disintegrating into its constituent republics is remembered quite differently in Russia as it is in the West - a sharply contrasted historic memory that perfectly reflects the diametric divergence of political worldviews and even values between East and West as the post-Cold War era has given way to the post-post-Cold War era.
As expected, American media is recalling the end of the great rival superpower that the Soviet Union had been by highlighting contemporary Putinist Russia's attempt to resurrect it; meanwhile official Russian media is lambasting the West for grossly oversimplifying the 1991 putsch as a tyrannical attempt to reimpose totalitarian rule on a freedom-yearning populace, which rightly rejected it in the most unequivocal manner.
Neither end of the spectrum finds it particularly convenient to acknowledge the central fact of the events of a quarter century ago, though both would almost certainly have to agree: that it was Russia that ended the Soviet Union.
After the fall of its satellite eastern bloc in the revolutions of 1989, the USSR found itself with little choice but to decentralize and federalize its own constituent republics. It was this loosening of centralized Soviet rule from the Kremlin that propelled Boris Yeltsin to power in 1990-91 as the undisputed leader of a new power structure within the individual member republics which no longer really answered to the traditional Soviet hierarchy spanning all of them (even as it nominally remained part of it). As elected head of the new federated Russian socialist republic, in summer 1991 Yeltsin moved rapidly to mop up what little remained of real Soviet governing authority emanating from the Kremlin. In all but name, this was a rebirth of Russian nationalism: it was hardly a coincidence, too, that Yeltsin was by then an openly devout Orthodox Christian, cultivating close ties with a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church.
The August 19 plotters may have been incompetent and badly out of touch with the sheer bankruptcy of communism at that juncture in history, but they were sincere in their greatest fear, however exaggerated it turned out to be: that unless Soviet power was reestablished over the republics, the USSR would descend into the kind of ethnic warfare across its constituents' boundaries of the kind that was then engulfing Yugoslavia. Thus when they struck, the hardliners knew exactly what they were attempting to preempt: sectarian nationalist strife. What they didn't count on, however, was that the main nationalist opposition to their scheme would come from none other than the dominant member of the union: Russia itself.
That's because the former Soviet Union wasn't exactly the former Yugoslavia: historically, tensions between Russians and Ukrainians, to take the two core Slavic ethnicities, were far less acrimonious overall than that between their equivalent pair, the Serbs and Croatians, in the Balkan region. On top of this, whereas Titoist strongman Slobodan Milosevic badly needed a new source of legitimacy as communism crumbled in the late 1980s and thus found it in posing as the protector of Serb minorities, Yeltsin rode to power on that very wave of proto-democratization of the Soviet republics that was unleashed by the mass liberalization of the east European satellite region of 1989. And although Milosevicesque jingoists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky also appeared on the freer Russian political scene of 1990-91, it was these very sectarian elements that the communist hardliners were seeking to rein in.
Thus the coup's dramatic meltdown on August 21 was a natural byproduct of a Russian neo-nationalism which wasn't expansionist, but indeed anti-imperial: a perfect confluence of factors ensured that such a reawakening of pre-communist political identity would be progressive and not reactionary in nature. As Yeltsin rallied for Russia's freedom atop the iconic tank in front of Moscow's Duma building, he and his predominantly Russian supporters found themselves in effect rallying for the independence of their far smaller and weaker fellow republics, as well.
The Russian Orthodox Church, too, stepped up to the plate at a crucial moment: Patriarch Alexei II's radio broadcast in which the former KBG collaborator warned Soviet security forces that firing on unarmed demonstrators constituted a grave sin before God, coupled with the threat of retaliatory airstrikes against the Kremlin itself by dissenting Soviet officers, decisively tipped the scales of violent coercion against the putschists. And Yeltsin himself, by then a devout practicing Orthodox Christian, took special care to secure Church blessing for his resistance effort.
Without Russia turning against it, the Soviet Union could have ended far more violently - that it was in fact Russia's own role which was central to the death of the old order and the emergence of a new one, all with relatively little bloodshed, is beyond dispute.
What's fundamentally shifted during the 21st-century Putin era, however, is the broad understanding and perception of just what kind of reborn and reawakened Russia actually arose from the Soviet ashes 25 years ago.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup's collapse exactly a quarter of a century ago today, there was little doubt to most observers both within and outside the Soviet Union that an unequivocally free, democratic, Westernized and free-market new liberal Russian society was a sure thing. And yet underneath this bubbly surface, all was not well.
The fall of its satellite empire in eastern Europe and mushrooming of ethnic separatism among its own republics had already in 1990-91 triggered a reactionary Russian jingoism in the heart of the waning USSR that was at once a threat to its internal peace and stability in that twilight period of communist rule. Ostensibly this was precisely what the ill-fated August 19 junta was trying to contain, but in fact its repression of all expressions of autonomy from the Soviet center - i.e. including Russia's own - was most enthusiastically supported by these same right-wing Russian nationalists, and this association has never been broken in the intervening decades: the August 19 coup's failure is widely (if even by no means universally) mourned by the Putinist brand of Russian political identity to the present day (as well as its more extreme offshoots and variants).
What's intriguingly significant, though, is how quickly and dramatically the Russian parliamentary coalition that propelled Yeltsin to power in 1991-92 turned against the first post-Soviet Russian presidency: the showdown between the Kremlin and Duma of October 1993, which ended with a bloody siege of the parliament building, wasn't merely a result of the Yeltsin administration's badly bungled "shock therapy" program to get the Russian economy on a prosperous free-market footing; it was on a deeper level a reflection of just how provisional the lawmakers' alliance with the new chief executive was to begin with. Many of them, it turned out, wanted to do away with the old Soviet system merely so they could essentially privatize formerly state assets into their own pockets; in this they closely mirrored their ex-apparatchik counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus, whose own lukewarm support for independence in 1991 was sealed by assurances from the leaders of their newly autonomous republics that they could keep running their existing socialist factories and farms (i.e. effectively privatizing them by making themselves oligarchs). Instead Yeltsin, under heavy US and Western pressure to fully privatize to true entrepreneurs, not just cosmetically privatize by turning communists into capitalists, had to put the red managers out to dry.
In hindsight, Russia was fortunate that Yeltsin cracked down so hard, even undemocratically, on the resurgence of hard socialism that accompanied the resultant backlash: its post-Soviet economy hasn't been stellar, but it could easily have been even worse - neighboring Ukraine and Belarus, the former which has de-Sovietized more slowly than Russia, the latter which arguably hasn't even done so at all, are all the evidence one needs.
And that's the great paradox of post-Soviet Russia: from the virtual get-go, pure democracy failed. The West may point the finger all it wants at Putin, but the fact is that Putin simply capitalized on a new kind of centralized authoritarianism that was established in the Kremlin by his predecessor and his oligarch henchmen. They had their day in the 1990s - their critical role in history was to prevent the return of communism - but that day had run its course when the ex-KGB case officer rose to power in 1999-2000.
Today, the West and Russian liberals alike lament that such a bright Russian democratic spring in 1990-91 was apparently strangled by the dark scepter of reactionary ethnic and religious jingoism - and that this same disaster may be unfolding worldwide.
In fact, one could just as well argue that the democratic dream - that is to say, the most parochial and narrow Western liberal conception of it - died a long time ago. Not even democracy itself can be advanced or preserved through democratic means all or perhaps even most of the time. That was true for Russia in 1993, a full decade before the US put the same principle into practice in Iraq.
A few days ago, Mikhail Gorbachev himself recalled having given the US this tidbit of wisdom:
Democracy itself is never the problem: it's the self-professing democrats who exercise it that determine its success or failure. If there's any lesson that post-Soviet Russian history should impress on us 25 years on, it's that democracy is merely a means to an end - and if that end gets garbled or lost in the execution, it becomes as practically fit for the ash heap of history as any other political system. Freedom is never free, and if its entrusted guardians don't pay their special, even extraordinary dues, we're all in serious trouble.
As expected, American media is recalling the end of the great rival superpower that the Soviet Union had been by highlighting contemporary Putinist Russia's attempt to resurrect it; meanwhile official Russian media is lambasting the West for grossly oversimplifying the 1991 putsch as a tyrannical attempt to reimpose totalitarian rule on a freedom-yearning populace, which rightly rejected it in the most unequivocal manner.
Neither end of the spectrum finds it particularly convenient to acknowledge the central fact of the events of a quarter century ago, though both would almost certainly have to agree: that it was Russia that ended the Soviet Union.
After the fall of its satellite eastern bloc in the revolutions of 1989, the USSR found itself with little choice but to decentralize and federalize its own constituent republics. It was this loosening of centralized Soviet rule from the Kremlin that propelled Boris Yeltsin to power in 1990-91 as the undisputed leader of a new power structure within the individual member republics which no longer really answered to the traditional Soviet hierarchy spanning all of them (even as it nominally remained part of it). As elected head of the new federated Russian socialist republic, in summer 1991 Yeltsin moved rapidly to mop up what little remained of real Soviet governing authority emanating from the Kremlin. In all but name, this was a rebirth of Russian nationalism: it was hardly a coincidence, too, that Yeltsin was by then an openly devout Orthodox Christian, cultivating close ties with a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church.
The August 19 plotters may have been incompetent and badly out of touch with the sheer bankruptcy of communism at that juncture in history, but they were sincere in their greatest fear, however exaggerated it turned out to be: that unless Soviet power was reestablished over the republics, the USSR would descend into the kind of ethnic warfare across its constituents' boundaries of the kind that was then engulfing Yugoslavia. Thus when they struck, the hardliners knew exactly what they were attempting to preempt: sectarian nationalist strife. What they didn't count on, however, was that the main nationalist opposition to their scheme would come from none other than the dominant member of the union: Russia itself.
That's because the former Soviet Union wasn't exactly the former Yugoslavia: historically, tensions between Russians and Ukrainians, to take the two core Slavic ethnicities, were far less acrimonious overall than that between their equivalent pair, the Serbs and Croatians, in the Balkan region. On top of this, whereas Titoist strongman Slobodan Milosevic badly needed a new source of legitimacy as communism crumbled in the late 1980s and thus found it in posing as the protector of Serb minorities, Yeltsin rode to power on that very wave of proto-democratization of the Soviet republics that was unleashed by the mass liberalization of the east European satellite region of 1989. And although Milosevicesque jingoists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky also appeared on the freer Russian political scene of 1990-91, it was these very sectarian elements that the communist hardliners were seeking to rein in.
Thus the coup's dramatic meltdown on August 21 was a natural byproduct of a Russian neo-nationalism which wasn't expansionist, but indeed anti-imperial: a perfect confluence of factors ensured that such a reawakening of pre-communist political identity would be progressive and not reactionary in nature. As Yeltsin rallied for Russia's freedom atop the iconic tank in front of Moscow's Duma building, he and his predominantly Russian supporters found themselves in effect rallying for the independence of their far smaller and weaker fellow republics, as well.
The Russian Orthodox Church, too, stepped up to the plate at a crucial moment: Patriarch Alexei II's radio broadcast in which the former KBG collaborator warned Soviet security forces that firing on unarmed demonstrators constituted a grave sin before God, coupled with the threat of retaliatory airstrikes against the Kremlin itself by dissenting Soviet officers, decisively tipped the scales of violent coercion against the putschists. And Yeltsin himself, by then a devout practicing Orthodox Christian, took special care to secure Church blessing for his resistance effort.
Without Russia turning against it, the Soviet Union could have ended far more violently - that it was in fact Russia's own role which was central to the death of the old order and the emergence of a new one, all with relatively little bloodshed, is beyond dispute.
What's fundamentally shifted during the 21st-century Putin era, however, is the broad understanding and perception of just what kind of reborn and reawakened Russia actually arose from the Soviet ashes 25 years ago.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup's collapse exactly a quarter of a century ago today, there was little doubt to most observers both within and outside the Soviet Union that an unequivocally free, democratic, Westernized and free-market new liberal Russian society was a sure thing. And yet underneath this bubbly surface, all was not well.
The fall of its satellite empire in eastern Europe and mushrooming of ethnic separatism among its own republics had already in 1990-91 triggered a reactionary Russian jingoism in the heart of the waning USSR that was at once a threat to its internal peace and stability in that twilight period of communist rule. Ostensibly this was precisely what the ill-fated August 19 junta was trying to contain, but in fact its repression of all expressions of autonomy from the Soviet center - i.e. including Russia's own - was most enthusiastically supported by these same right-wing Russian nationalists, and this association has never been broken in the intervening decades: the August 19 coup's failure is widely (if even by no means universally) mourned by the Putinist brand of Russian political identity to the present day (as well as its more extreme offshoots and variants).
What's intriguingly significant, though, is how quickly and dramatically the Russian parliamentary coalition that propelled Yeltsin to power in 1991-92 turned against the first post-Soviet Russian presidency: the showdown between the Kremlin and Duma of October 1993, which ended with a bloody siege of the parliament building, wasn't merely a result of the Yeltsin administration's badly bungled "shock therapy" program to get the Russian economy on a prosperous free-market footing; it was on a deeper level a reflection of just how provisional the lawmakers' alliance with the new chief executive was to begin with. Many of them, it turned out, wanted to do away with the old Soviet system merely so they could essentially privatize formerly state assets into their own pockets; in this they closely mirrored their ex-apparatchik counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus, whose own lukewarm support for independence in 1991 was sealed by assurances from the leaders of their newly autonomous republics that they could keep running their existing socialist factories and farms (i.e. effectively privatizing them by making themselves oligarchs). Instead Yeltsin, under heavy US and Western pressure to fully privatize to true entrepreneurs, not just cosmetically privatize by turning communists into capitalists, had to put the red managers out to dry.
In hindsight, Russia was fortunate that Yeltsin cracked down so hard, even undemocratically, on the resurgence of hard socialism that accompanied the resultant backlash: its post-Soviet economy hasn't been stellar, but it could easily have been even worse - neighboring Ukraine and Belarus, the former which has de-Sovietized more slowly than Russia, the latter which arguably hasn't even done so at all, are all the evidence one needs.
And that's the great paradox of post-Soviet Russia: from the virtual get-go, pure democracy failed. The West may point the finger all it wants at Putin, but the fact is that Putin simply capitalized on a new kind of centralized authoritarianism that was established in the Kremlin by his predecessor and his oligarch henchmen. They had their day in the 1990s - their critical role in history was to prevent the return of communism - but that day had run its course when the ex-KGB case officer rose to power in 1999-2000.
Today, the West and Russian liberals alike lament that such a bright Russian democratic spring in 1990-91 was apparently strangled by the dark scepter of reactionary ethnic and religious jingoism - and that this same disaster may be unfolding worldwide.
In fact, one could just as well argue that the democratic dream - that is to say, the most parochial and narrow Western liberal conception of it - died a long time ago. Not even democracy itself can be advanced or preserved through democratic means all or perhaps even most of the time. That was true for Russia in 1993, a full decade before the US put the same principle into practice in Iraq.
A few days ago, Mikhail Gorbachev himself recalled having given the US this tidbit of wisdom:
The fact that the Western hero who freed the slaves behind the Iron Curtain is saying this now, on what should have been the commemoration of the start of an unvarnished golden era of democratic freedom worldwide, is a testimony to how badly awry the whole project has gone.“I told the Americans: you are trying to impose your democracy on the people of different countries, spreading it around like coffee in bags, but we must give the people a chance to make their own choice.”
Democracy itself is never the problem: it's the self-professing democrats who exercise it that determine its success or failure. If there's any lesson that post-Soviet Russian history should impress on us 25 years on, it's that democracy is merely a means to an end - and if that end gets garbled or lost in the execution, it becomes as practically fit for the ash heap of history as any other political system. Freedom is never free, and if its entrusted guardians don't pay their special, even extraordinary dues, we're all in serious trouble.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Axis of Fatima laying political and diplomatic groundwork for victory
This blog's observation eleven days ago that the Syrian conflict is becoming a clear binary choice between Assad's brutal secular regime and Sunni extremists in the central battleground of Aleppo is being verified by diplomatic, political, and military developments on the ground which are emerging into the open.
Even Western media now admits the obvious: the battle of Aleppo has essentially become a sectarian showdown between Sunni and Shia jihadists from all across the region. That's really, really bad news for US policy: not only does it mean we no longer have a viable dog in this fight, but if anything, we're now coming under increasing pressure to join the Russian and Syrian regime air campaign against the Salafists led by the former Al Nusra Front (i.e. Al Qaeda in Syria), whose embrace of suicide attacks and fanaticism more generally has given them a glaring edge in battlefield effectiveness against Damascus relative to the remaining secular opposition fighters (i.e. Free Syrian Army or FSA).
Thus Putin, Assad, Iran and its proxies - the Axis of Fatima - now have exactly the war they want. Al Qaeda's dominant presence on the front lines of Aleppo puts their real opponents - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and ultimately the US - in a political logjam: if they're serious about fighting extremism and terrorism, it's hard to put on a good face about deliberately avoiding targeting forces that are openly fighting for Shia, Alawite, and Christian genocide.
For starters, Washington is now out of the equation as a serious military-strategic player concerning Aleppo: after all, we're as existentially opposed to the proto-Talibanization of Syria as we are to the continued rule of Assad. The futility of our policy of regime change is now obvious for the entire world to see: those very factions most credible as alternatives to Assad aren't merely getting our cold shoulder, but must even be considered for our own bombs.
That leaves Turkey as the crucial swing factor: the way it recalibrates its relationship with the Syrian opposition - with all its moderate and extreme elements - will largely determine both the military and eventual political outcome of the battle for Aleppo. And of course, this will entirely be a function of Ankara's realigned internal politics in the wake of the July 15 putsch: how Mr. Erdogan rejuggles the balance of secularists and Islamists within his own government and military will have major bearing on the ultimate denouement of the armed stalemate across the border.
Already Turkey has made tentative (and still conflicting) gestures of dropping its implacable opposition to Assad's political survival; doubtless this is reflective of a highly fluid situation that's complicated greatly by the country's uncertain future both as a NATO member and as an aspiring EU one. As a prudent politician, Erdogan simply can't sacrifice wholesale secular interests for Islamist ones or vice versa - either at home or across the Syrian frontier; his even more pressing concern in any case would appear to be the Kurds.
That means Turkey will most likely use its influence to rein in the jihadist coalition at Aleppo from seeking a complete victory (one that's unlikely anyway) and instead direct them to collaborate with the remaining secular revolutionary opposition within the besieged rebel-held part of the city to relaunch the political transition process: at this juncture, probably the best Ankara could hope for is a freeze to the whole war that leaves Islamists with de facto control of virtually all of Idlib province, parts of the Aleppo countryside, and a limited enclave in Aleppo itself. Such a truce would also leave the original Syrian revolution intact politically to negotiate with Assad on behalf of the secular, moderate Islamist, and extreme Islamist opposition alike.That's where Turkish efforts and influence will face its test: the jihadists and probably even secular revolutionaries aren't likely to be swayed that military victory should be abandoned, but for some at least, that depends on how Assad himself behaves in this whole situation.
Russia for its part seems to already be pushing Damascus to open up to the political process again: its brief applications of ceasefires and bombing halts, with proposals for more extended lulls, point in that direction. Clearly, Putin wants to impress on Mr. Assad that the Syrian regime's key objective right now is political not military: namely, to secure a détente with Erdogan. Such an accord, especially if enforced on the Turkish side by an intensified crackdown on dissent against the presidency, would serve Damascus far more than retaking Aleppo. Given that both the regime and its Iranian-sponsored militia allies have reinforced the city's front lines by the thousands since their siege was punctured two weeks ago - on top of a re-intensified Russian air campaign - the present stalemate should be more than sustainable, giving a sufficient backdrop to an eventual restart of negotiations per the Geneva format.
That would be a major diplomatic coup for the Axis of Fatima: if a resumed Geneva enshrines Turkish acceptance of Assad's role in a political transition. To facilitate such an outcome, the Syrian regime has clearly increased its overtures to other major powers: both India and China have been responsive to a broader re-legitimization of the government in Damascus amongst the international community (one can smell Russian influence or even orchestration behind this, too).
As these political and diplomatic chips fall into place for the Axis of Fatima, the final wild card will be the US, Saudi, and wider Sunni Arab (especially Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC) response. They would seem to be the big losers in the event of Assad's survival and Putin's ascendancy in the Levant, but only if they fail to adapt to a new strategic reality. With both Turkey and the US no longer in the coalition to eliminate Assad, their own support for the effort is effectively neutered.
Even this, of course, doesn't rule out the unfortunate possibility that the jihadists or even revolutionaries at Aleppo may well be suicidal: so bent on revenge and destruction of the hated old order that they won't settle for even an appreciable role in shaping a new one. Sad to say, but should that come to pass, the kid gloves will have to come off.
Optimistically, all will be well in the end, if only because even the apparent losers will have no palatable alternatives. Quite bluntly, even if America's Sunni allies in the region lose faith altogether in Washington, their only alternative is the emerging Moscow-Beijing axis. And for all its authoritarianism - probably actually because of it - any Sino-Russian order would have far less interest in proxy warfare through "democratic" insurrections. Not least because the likes of Saudi Arabia have little use for Western liberalism themselves, such a switch would actually be quite natural.
Even Western media now admits the obvious: the battle of Aleppo has essentially become a sectarian showdown between Sunni and Shia jihadists from all across the region. That's really, really bad news for US policy: not only does it mean we no longer have a viable dog in this fight, but if anything, we're now coming under increasing pressure to join the Russian and Syrian regime air campaign against the Salafists led by the former Al Nusra Front (i.e. Al Qaeda in Syria), whose embrace of suicide attacks and fanaticism more generally has given them a glaring edge in battlefield effectiveness against Damascus relative to the remaining secular opposition fighters (i.e. Free Syrian Army or FSA).
Thus Putin, Assad, Iran and its proxies - the Axis of Fatima - now have exactly the war they want. Al Qaeda's dominant presence on the front lines of Aleppo puts their real opponents - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and ultimately the US - in a political logjam: if they're serious about fighting extremism and terrorism, it's hard to put on a good face about deliberately avoiding targeting forces that are openly fighting for Shia, Alawite, and Christian genocide.
For starters, Washington is now out of the equation as a serious military-strategic player concerning Aleppo: after all, we're as existentially opposed to the proto-Talibanization of Syria as we are to the continued rule of Assad. The futility of our policy of regime change is now obvious for the entire world to see: those very factions most credible as alternatives to Assad aren't merely getting our cold shoulder, but must even be considered for our own bombs.
That leaves Turkey as the crucial swing factor: the way it recalibrates its relationship with the Syrian opposition - with all its moderate and extreme elements - will largely determine both the military and eventual political outcome of the battle for Aleppo. And of course, this will entirely be a function of Ankara's realigned internal politics in the wake of the July 15 putsch: how Mr. Erdogan rejuggles the balance of secularists and Islamists within his own government and military will have major bearing on the ultimate denouement of the armed stalemate across the border.
Already Turkey has made tentative (and still conflicting) gestures of dropping its implacable opposition to Assad's political survival; doubtless this is reflective of a highly fluid situation that's complicated greatly by the country's uncertain future both as a NATO member and as an aspiring EU one. As a prudent politician, Erdogan simply can't sacrifice wholesale secular interests for Islamist ones or vice versa - either at home or across the Syrian frontier; his even more pressing concern in any case would appear to be the Kurds.
That means Turkey will most likely use its influence to rein in the jihadist coalition at Aleppo from seeking a complete victory (one that's unlikely anyway) and instead direct them to collaborate with the remaining secular revolutionary opposition within the besieged rebel-held part of the city to relaunch the political transition process: at this juncture, probably the best Ankara could hope for is a freeze to the whole war that leaves Islamists with de facto control of virtually all of Idlib province, parts of the Aleppo countryside, and a limited enclave in Aleppo itself. Such a truce would also leave the original Syrian revolution intact politically to negotiate with Assad on behalf of the secular, moderate Islamist, and extreme Islamist opposition alike.That's where Turkish efforts and influence will face its test: the jihadists and probably even secular revolutionaries aren't likely to be swayed that military victory should be abandoned, but for some at least, that depends on how Assad himself behaves in this whole situation.
Russia for its part seems to already be pushing Damascus to open up to the political process again: its brief applications of ceasefires and bombing halts, with proposals for more extended lulls, point in that direction. Clearly, Putin wants to impress on Mr. Assad that the Syrian regime's key objective right now is political not military: namely, to secure a détente with Erdogan. Such an accord, especially if enforced on the Turkish side by an intensified crackdown on dissent against the presidency, would serve Damascus far more than retaking Aleppo. Given that both the regime and its Iranian-sponsored militia allies have reinforced the city's front lines by the thousands since their siege was punctured two weeks ago - on top of a re-intensified Russian air campaign - the present stalemate should be more than sustainable, giving a sufficient backdrop to an eventual restart of negotiations per the Geneva format.
That would be a major diplomatic coup for the Axis of Fatima: if a resumed Geneva enshrines Turkish acceptance of Assad's role in a political transition. To facilitate such an outcome, the Syrian regime has clearly increased its overtures to other major powers: both India and China have been responsive to a broader re-legitimization of the government in Damascus amongst the international community (one can smell Russian influence or even orchestration behind this, too).
As these political and diplomatic chips fall into place for the Axis of Fatima, the final wild card will be the US, Saudi, and wider Sunni Arab (especially Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC) response. They would seem to be the big losers in the event of Assad's survival and Putin's ascendancy in the Levant, but only if they fail to adapt to a new strategic reality. With both Turkey and the US no longer in the coalition to eliminate Assad, their own support for the effort is effectively neutered.
Even this, of course, doesn't rule out the unfortunate possibility that the jihadists or even revolutionaries at Aleppo may well be suicidal: so bent on revenge and destruction of the hated old order that they won't settle for even an appreciable role in shaping a new one. Sad to say, but should that come to pass, the kid gloves will have to come off.
Optimistically, all will be well in the end, if only because even the apparent losers will have no palatable alternatives. Quite bluntly, even if America's Sunni allies in the region lose faith altogether in Washington, their only alternative is the emerging Moscow-Beijing axis. And for all its authoritarianism - probably actually because of it - any Sino-Russian order would have far less interest in proxy warfare through "democratic" insurrections. Not least because the likes of Saudi Arabia have little use for Western liberalism themselves, such a switch would actually be quite natural.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
It's time for Russia to crush the Syrian revolution once and for all
Russia has escalated its air campaign in Syria by launching airstrikes from Iran for the first time since the start of its intervention to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad nearly 11 months ago. The development comes as a stalemate in Aleppo is being spun - almost ludicrously, but not at all unexpectedly - by mainstream US media, as in this New York Times article, as an acknowledgment by Moscow that its campaign is failing.
Quite the contrary, knowing Putin's treatment of the stubborn urban guerrillas of Chechnya, this could instead be the Kremlin's last diplomatic push before unleashing the full brunt of its heavy strategic bombers - the ones now starting their attack runs from Iran - on the rebel holdouts of eastern Aleppo as well as any tentative supply lines keeping their resistance alive. Having lost patience and tolerance, Messrs. Putin and Assad have decided that it's about time to just wipe the remnants of the Syrian revolution off the face of the earth.
In this light, it's actually Moscow which has presented Washington with an ultimatum: either join us to bomb the terrorist groups which are now quite openly the only effective force preventing a successful starvation siege of the city by pro-government forces, or we'll have to defeat them ourselves - by razing to the ground those neighborhoods they're seeking to "liberate."
With reports leaking out that Russia and the US are yet again close to collaborating against ISIS and Al Nusra Front (now renamed Conquest of Syria Front or Jabhat Fatah al-Sham), as well as intense negotiations between Russia and the West more generally on opening humanitarian corridors from the besieged erstwhile commercial center, the optics are in place for Putin to reasonably tell the world that he did just about everything he could to prevent a bloodbath in the pivotal battle of the five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war. Should the US and its Sunni Arab proxies still refuse to make concessions here, the die could well be cast: rebel-held Aleppo will have to be flattened to the ground.
In fact, one must wonder just which outcome the Russians would actually prefer - that is, whether they'd rather do away with Al Nusra and its kindred Salafist militant groups that are defined by their violent intolerance of Shias and Alawites, or whether it'd be better to liquidate the remnants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and similar secular nationalist resistance holed up in Aleppo's ruins. Knowing full well that even with a decisive victory at Aleppo, Assad's forces are almost certainly too weak to retake and hold jihadist-dominated Idlib province and perhaps even sectors of Aleppo province itself, the Kremlin realizes that it must deal prudently with Turkey and even Saudi Arabia regarding prospective local Sunni autonomy in those parts of the country least hospitable to the Baath regime and its Shia allies. Since Al Nusra has now moved from de facto to virtually de jure leadership of the constellation of Salafist groups which comprise the bulk of effective non-ISIS opposition to Assad, although it would be great for Putin to enlist American airpower to do his bidding against them, if Mr. Obama yet again refuses (as he almost certainly will) to stick it to the deep-state power brokers at Langley and the Pentagon that still want to preserve the tottering American hegemony in the region, it makes more sense for Russia to eliminate whatever "moderate" opposition remains on the battlefield (primarily in Aleppo itself) and thereby remove from the bargaining table any diehard Syrian revolutionaries who for so long have conveniently relied on the jihadists (without appearing to) to sustain their vendetta against Damascus.
It's high time to start punishing those parties to the conflict whose intransigent defiance of hard realities on the ground is prolonging the defunct cause of Syrian regime change well beyond its plausible lifespan - and prolonging both ISIS and global terrorism in the process. By stonewalling the legitimate common fight against what's effectively still Al Qaeda in Syria, the neocon imperialist war faction has extended the unwarranted hope among the opposition that Washington can yet still force Assad's abdication. This costly delusion must now be dispelled: it's time for Russia to show the world that Assad's existence is indeed the only thing preventing the rise of a virulent neo-Wahhabist emirate in non-ISIS opposition areas that's completely antithetical to the original liberal aims of the Arab spring, and in fact whose differences with ISIS itself are more of style and degree than of underlying substance.
That spring is now long dead, and but for the career imperialists in the Beltway and their effective stooges in the Arab world, even US policy would have adjusted to it accordingly a while ago. Yet instead, it's this very American inflexibility and hubris, coupled with the revolution's corruption to the passions of vengeance, which will all but ensure the nastiest of defeats at the hands of Russia and the Axis of Fatima.
The Syrian revolution deserves to be crushed once and for all - its graveyard should be a leveled eastern Aleppo. The brutal jihadists are far more representative of popular Sunni sentiment in so-called US allies than are any politically unviable secular or merely lukewarmly Islamist factions: it's about time they and their Turkish, Saudi, and other Gulf Sunni sponsors are outed in the open as being just fine with a new Syria that's anything but a model liberal democracy based on Western values - just so long as Assad's gone.
Russia under Putin can deal with that - easily. In time, even we won't be able to still pretend that it's not, at best, a binary choice between secular dictators and religious ones - if it's not an outright worse one between autocrats and terrorists.
Quite the contrary, knowing Putin's treatment of the stubborn urban guerrillas of Chechnya, this could instead be the Kremlin's last diplomatic push before unleashing the full brunt of its heavy strategic bombers - the ones now starting their attack runs from Iran - on the rebel holdouts of eastern Aleppo as well as any tentative supply lines keeping their resistance alive. Having lost patience and tolerance, Messrs. Putin and Assad have decided that it's about time to just wipe the remnants of the Syrian revolution off the face of the earth.
In this light, it's actually Moscow which has presented Washington with an ultimatum: either join us to bomb the terrorist groups which are now quite openly the only effective force preventing a successful starvation siege of the city by pro-government forces, or we'll have to defeat them ourselves - by razing to the ground those neighborhoods they're seeking to "liberate."
With reports leaking out that Russia and the US are yet again close to collaborating against ISIS and Al Nusra Front (now renamed Conquest of Syria Front or Jabhat Fatah al-Sham), as well as intense negotiations between Russia and the West more generally on opening humanitarian corridors from the besieged erstwhile commercial center, the optics are in place for Putin to reasonably tell the world that he did just about everything he could to prevent a bloodbath in the pivotal battle of the five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war. Should the US and its Sunni Arab proxies still refuse to make concessions here, the die could well be cast: rebel-held Aleppo will have to be flattened to the ground.
In fact, one must wonder just which outcome the Russians would actually prefer - that is, whether they'd rather do away with Al Nusra and its kindred Salafist militant groups that are defined by their violent intolerance of Shias and Alawites, or whether it'd be better to liquidate the remnants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and similar secular nationalist resistance holed up in Aleppo's ruins. Knowing full well that even with a decisive victory at Aleppo, Assad's forces are almost certainly too weak to retake and hold jihadist-dominated Idlib province and perhaps even sectors of Aleppo province itself, the Kremlin realizes that it must deal prudently with Turkey and even Saudi Arabia regarding prospective local Sunni autonomy in those parts of the country least hospitable to the Baath regime and its Shia allies. Since Al Nusra has now moved from de facto to virtually de jure leadership of the constellation of Salafist groups which comprise the bulk of effective non-ISIS opposition to Assad, although it would be great for Putin to enlist American airpower to do his bidding against them, if Mr. Obama yet again refuses (as he almost certainly will) to stick it to the deep-state power brokers at Langley and the Pentagon that still want to preserve the tottering American hegemony in the region, it makes more sense for Russia to eliminate whatever "moderate" opposition remains on the battlefield (primarily in Aleppo itself) and thereby remove from the bargaining table any diehard Syrian revolutionaries who for so long have conveniently relied on the jihadists (without appearing to) to sustain their vendetta against Damascus.
It's high time to start punishing those parties to the conflict whose intransigent defiance of hard realities on the ground is prolonging the defunct cause of Syrian regime change well beyond its plausible lifespan - and prolonging both ISIS and global terrorism in the process. By stonewalling the legitimate common fight against what's effectively still Al Qaeda in Syria, the neocon imperialist war faction has extended the unwarranted hope among the opposition that Washington can yet still force Assad's abdication. This costly delusion must now be dispelled: it's time for Russia to show the world that Assad's existence is indeed the only thing preventing the rise of a virulent neo-Wahhabist emirate in non-ISIS opposition areas that's completely antithetical to the original liberal aims of the Arab spring, and in fact whose differences with ISIS itself are more of style and degree than of underlying substance.
That spring is now long dead, and but for the career imperialists in the Beltway and their effective stooges in the Arab world, even US policy would have adjusted to it accordingly a while ago. Yet instead, it's this very American inflexibility and hubris, coupled with the revolution's corruption to the passions of vengeance, which will all but ensure the nastiest of defeats at the hands of Russia and the Axis of Fatima.
The Syrian revolution deserves to be crushed once and for all - its graveyard should be a leveled eastern Aleppo. The brutal jihadists are far more representative of popular Sunni sentiment in so-called US allies than are any politically unviable secular or merely lukewarmly Islamist factions: it's about time they and their Turkish, Saudi, and other Gulf Sunni sponsors are outed in the open as being just fine with a new Syria that's anything but a model liberal democracy based on Western values - just so long as Assad's gone.
Russia under Putin can deal with that - easily. In time, even we won't be able to still pretend that it's not, at best, a binary choice between secular dictators and religious ones - if it's not an outright worse one between autocrats and terrorists.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Aleppo stalemate could lead to legitmization of jihadists
At the moment, a brief respite in the heaviest of the Aleppo fighting could be an indication of an accord between Putin and Erdogan (who have just met to reset Russo-Turkish relations) to deescalate the Syrian crisis and gradually restart the UN-sponsored peace process.
The stalemate in Syria's second city and commercial hub could lead to a new, unprecedented legitimization of jihadists in the long-term resolution of the conflict - a development that probably wouldn't be as terrible as the West is naturally inclined to fear.
The fact is, groups like the rebranded Al Nusra Front (now called Conquest of Syria Front) have dominated the insurgency in Idlib, Latakia, and Aleppo provinces in Syria for so long that they've become political as well as military fixtures in much of the region - or perhaps more accurately, their continued battlefield prowess is directly a function of their political acumen. Somewhat reminiscent of how the Shia militant faction Hezbollah became ensconced in parts of Lebanon over the course of that country's long civil war in the 1980s, the Sunni jihadists have likewise implanted themselves in a sizeable chunk of territory in the Syrian northwest (primarily Idlib province) not merely through force of arms, but day-to-day governance and administration that has earned them the respect, in some cases even the endearment, of local communities.
Without such a substantial geographic support base, it's impossible for these militants to launch the kind of large attacks that last week broke through the Assad regime's encirclement of Aleppo.
These non-ISIS Islamic militants also offer a much-needed counterpoint to the wanton violence and destruction of their erstwhile allies against Damascus: while in many cases no less committed to Sharia rule and strict interpretations of the Quran, they've been far more measured and targeted in their application of violence. Their intolerance of Shias, Alawites, Christians, moderate Sunnis, and more generally the secularized world at large seems not to be an end in itself, as often appears to be the case with the pathological killers of Daesh: rather, it's treated as a necessary component in the strategy of consolidating power in the core areas of Salafist control in the context of an ongoing brutal war of annihilation.
In that light, Al Nusra's break with Al Qaeda two weeks ago shows the flexibility and adaptivity of the jihadists in achieving their aims. The implementation of Islamic rule in the areas it dominates is a hard "fact on the ground" that has far more real value to Syria's Islamic revolution than any generalized "solidarity" with Islamic militancy worldwide. Should the Sunni fundamentalists who have spearheaded the struggle against Assad since 2013 continue to shift gears to a hybrid military-political track, it could pave the way for a broad recognition of the Salafist role in a new, federated and multifaceted Syrian political landscape.
That could prove a harder pill to swallow for Assad and for Washington than it would be for Putin or Erdogan; but if Moscow and Ankara become the principal proponents for locking down the current stalemate in Aleppo - as the centerpiece of a broader equilibrium in Syria as a whole - it becomes far easier to see a situation in which those who can live with a partial victory would gladly settle for a partial defeat to secure it.
Either way, the jihadists would serve their own cause well to become progressively more moderate in their short-term demands and objectives; their overarching aim now should be to win seats and influence at the negotiating table, and their military activity should be aligned to that end. Every civil war's resolution ultimately boils down to a question of peacetime governance - so much so that its military aspect is really just a lagging reflection of the underlying political dilemma. If the Salafists want any degree of lasting legacy to show for their sacrifices, they would do well to recognize the implausibility of imposing Sharia beyond their favorable demographic sectors; just as, by the same token, if Mr. Assad wants to present to the world a binary choice between a secular police state and a Sunni jihadistan, he must concede that the latter will have to hold at least some credible piece of real estate.
The stalemate in Syria's second city and commercial hub could lead to a new, unprecedented legitimization of jihadists in the long-term resolution of the conflict - a development that probably wouldn't be as terrible as the West is naturally inclined to fear.
The fact is, groups like the rebranded Al Nusra Front (now called Conquest of Syria Front) have dominated the insurgency in Idlib, Latakia, and Aleppo provinces in Syria for so long that they've become political as well as military fixtures in much of the region - or perhaps more accurately, their continued battlefield prowess is directly a function of their political acumen. Somewhat reminiscent of how the Shia militant faction Hezbollah became ensconced in parts of Lebanon over the course of that country's long civil war in the 1980s, the Sunni jihadists have likewise implanted themselves in a sizeable chunk of territory in the Syrian northwest (primarily Idlib province) not merely through force of arms, but day-to-day governance and administration that has earned them the respect, in some cases even the endearment, of local communities.
Without such a substantial geographic support base, it's impossible for these militants to launch the kind of large attacks that last week broke through the Assad regime's encirclement of Aleppo.
These non-ISIS Islamic militants also offer a much-needed counterpoint to the wanton violence and destruction of their erstwhile allies against Damascus: while in many cases no less committed to Sharia rule and strict interpretations of the Quran, they've been far more measured and targeted in their application of violence. Their intolerance of Shias, Alawites, Christians, moderate Sunnis, and more generally the secularized world at large seems not to be an end in itself, as often appears to be the case with the pathological killers of Daesh: rather, it's treated as a necessary component in the strategy of consolidating power in the core areas of Salafist control in the context of an ongoing brutal war of annihilation.
In that light, Al Nusra's break with Al Qaeda two weeks ago shows the flexibility and adaptivity of the jihadists in achieving their aims. The implementation of Islamic rule in the areas it dominates is a hard "fact on the ground" that has far more real value to Syria's Islamic revolution than any generalized "solidarity" with Islamic militancy worldwide. Should the Sunni fundamentalists who have spearheaded the struggle against Assad since 2013 continue to shift gears to a hybrid military-political track, it could pave the way for a broad recognition of the Salafist role in a new, federated and multifaceted Syrian political landscape.
That could prove a harder pill to swallow for Assad and for Washington than it would be for Putin or Erdogan; but if Moscow and Ankara become the principal proponents for locking down the current stalemate in Aleppo - as the centerpiece of a broader equilibrium in Syria as a whole - it becomes far easier to see a situation in which those who can live with a partial victory would gladly settle for a partial defeat to secure it.
Either way, the jihadists would serve their own cause well to become progressively more moderate in their short-term demands and objectives; their overarching aim now should be to win seats and influence at the negotiating table, and their military activity should be aligned to that end. Every civil war's resolution ultimately boils down to a question of peacetime governance - so much so that its military aspect is really just a lagging reflection of the underlying political dilemma. If the Salafists want any degree of lasting legacy to show for their sacrifices, they would do well to recognize the implausibility of imposing Sharia beyond their favorable demographic sectors; just as, by the same token, if Mr. Assad wants to present to the world a binary choice between a secular police state and a Sunni jihadistan, he must concede that the latter will have to hold at least some credible piece of real estate.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Syrian conflict becoming a clearer binary choice at Aleppo
Yesterday, August 6, the Syrian rebels at least tentatively broke through a three-week-old siege of Aleppo. Considering the seemingly desperate straits that the whole anti-Assad insurgency had fallen into in the preceding weeks, the victory was a huge propaganda coup, as pro-rebel media pounced on opposition rejoicing in the beleaguered east of the city.
Per today's updates, it's still to be seen whether this breakthrough will translate into a sustainable supply corridor being opened up to the rebel-held enclave; some aid has apparently gone through already, but clearly not enough to significantly tip the scales against the regime:
That's despite the fact that about ten days ago, Al Nusra Front had rebranded itself as Fatah al-Sham (Conquest of Syria) Front, severing its official ties with parent group Al Qaeda in an apparent move to exempt itself from proposed joint US-Russian airstrikes on ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. In the immediate wake of the schism, the whole motley collection of jihadist outfits throughout Idlib and western Aleppo provinces seemed to quickly coalesce around the new Fatah al-Sham to launch a new combined offensive effort to relieve their besieged allies in the east of Aleppo city - though this joint force still operated, as before, under the Islamist umbrella banner of the "Army of Conquest."
Nobody should have any illusions as to what this really means: with a minor tactical, largely cosmetic organizational adjustment, Al Qaeda in Syria has effectively removed the target sign for US airpower hanging on its back, and has thereby taken virtual command of the anti-Assad insurgency - comprised as it predominantly is of other militant Islamist groups which have long colluded with it, but not overtly so as to remain in Washington's good graces themselves.
While it's long been known that the lines between moderate Islamist militants and their more extreme jihadist cousins like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are blurry, Washington, with its intransigence in pursuing regime change against Assad since 2011, has for years misled the American and Western public into thinking that the Syrian civil war isn't in fact essentially a binary choice between a ruthless secular dictatorship and a violent reactionary theocracy.
In fact, this was the widely unacknowledged reason that three years ago this month, Barack Obama's infamous "red line" against Damascus on the use of chemical weapons proved to be a monumental bluff: as soon as Washington actually started drawing up war plans against Assad, it became crystal-clear to the deep state of the CIA and Pentagon that they were essentially being drafted to become Al Qaeda's air force in Syria. Realizing the political unacceptability of such a military intervention, Obama conveniently punted the decision to use force to a notoriously gridlocked Congress.
In lieu of direct action, the Obama administration opted for a halfhearted and ultimately fruitless program to train and equip a rebel proxy force to fight both Assad and, from early 2014, the rising threat of a particularly virulent Al Nusra offshoot, Islamic State (ISIS). More significantly, it stepped up lethal and non-lethal aid alike through various back channels in its regional Sunni allies to any number of vetted rebel outfits - in the full knowledge that this materiel could end up in the hands of extremists who just so happened to be better at killing pro-Assad personnel. This enabled the CIA and Pentagon to perpetuate the myth that there was still a credible non-jihadist alternative to the Assad regime: whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. In fact, the vaunted Free Syrian Army (FSA) was by then past its operational prime: without the infusion of fanatical jihadist blood into the insurgency's ranks throughout 2013-14, it's probable that the Iranian and Hezbollah-bolstered Assad regime would have been able to grind it into the dust with ruthless attrition.
Further, as ISIS became a more prominent regional threat, especially in Iraq, the US then ratcheted up the pressure through its Sunni allies, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to force a decisive conclusion to the Syrian civil war by securing, at long last, Assad's ouster. In early 2015, the newly formed Army of Conquest effectively combined the Islamist resistance forces of northwestern Syria into a single loose constellation, allowing the rebels to make such threatening advances on the regime's traditional strongholds in coastal Latakia province that Assad had to concede additional territory to ISIS and at the same time subcontract such a large chunk of his fighting to Hezbollah and other Iranian-sponsored Shia militias that Damascus was effectively reduced to a satrap of Tehran (a condition unacceptable to the Baath government and one of the main reasons it lobbied Putin for Moscow's intervention).
At this juncture, Washington was drawing up its coup de grâce: a no-fly zone in northern Syria that would ground Assad's air force and ensure a speedy insurgent takeover of the remainder of Idlib province and even much of Latakia province (the prize being the port of Latakia itself). Needless to say, this is where American leaders and policymakers underestimated so badly the extent of Russia's determination to not let its sole naval access point in the eastern Mediterranean fall to a Sunni fundamentalist Western proxy.
Through all these developments, the Syrian conflict had steadily morphed from a democratic revolution to a radical Islamic insurrection. Such a plain fact was lost on no one, but from the get-go it has presented the world's sole superpower with a vexing dilemma: it couldn't countenance any future for Syria with Assad in the picture in any way, shape, or form; yet as the war dragged on, the strongest impetus for eliminating the Baath regime came increasingly from forces who were no less hostile to Western liberal democratic values. The Obama administration walked a tightrope: it absolutely needed the battlefield pressure that extremists like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham were applying on Damascus, yet it had to minimize their ultimate political role in Syria's transition. As the fight for Aleppo intensifies to a crescendo, it becomes clear that this practically impossible balancing act has always depended to a large extent on the ultimate fate of that city in particular.
Without control of a major urban center, the Syrian opposition has little credible leverage in the political settlement sponsored by the UN at Geneva: it thus follows that not only must it retain control of its sector of Aleppo, but it must also keep itself as free of radical jihadist influence as possible. The embattled remnants of the Syrian revolution - still defiantly clinging to a vision of the country free of both Assad and Islamic extremism - have essentially staked all their bets on riding out the long storm engulfing the country's second city and longtime commercial hub.
For this reason, rebel forces in and around Aleppo city have been disproportionately of the secular revolutionary variety - FSA and similar outfits - for much longer than most anywhere else in Syria. Even the local Islamist units are fiercely opposed not merely to ISIS, but have battled Al Nusra and its affiliates as well.
The latest developments in Aleppo could therefore be at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Syrian opposition: the return of Al Qaeda and its kindred Salafist spirits - even under a new local name - means that acknowledged terrorist bands are playing a key, even central, role in shaping the outcome of the most critical battle of the war. That could throw a monkey wrench into the opposition's hopes for a united front at the Geneva talks.
The immediate situation is that the battle appears far from over: the independent Russian strategic news service Southfront reports that the jihadists haven't truly secured the supply route they've claimed to open, as they must first clear varied pockets of regime regulars and pro-regime militias in their immediate vicinity. Given Russo-Syrian airpower, it may be difficult to utilize the corridor even if they do.
Moving further on out from here, even if the jihadists prevail and genuinely lift the siege, one must wonder how kindly they and their sympathizers (who have probably grown exponentially within Aleppo city in the last couple of weeks) will take to being undercut by the politically favored yet militarily toothless secular elements of the opposition during peace negotiations under watchful US sponsorship.
Obama doubtless hopes that even if US aims in Syria are subjected to the desires of radicals who are cut from the same cloth as those that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 - not to mention those whose head-chopping and child-molesting exploits have earned a name for themselves - that yet somehow the world and the American public can still be led to believe that the five-and-a-half year Syrian civil war could end in a democratic third way.
The US left Afghanistan over a quarter-century ago because it was assumed that just because our friends in Kabul wore Western suits and ties and had the right "free-market capitalist" inclinations, then it didn't matter that so many heavily armed warlords who actually ruled the vast countryside were such irreconcilable antitheses to the very notions of secularism and liberalism. In the years since, you'd think our richly checkered experiences of nation-building in the Islamic world would've instilled the hard lesson at Langley, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and so on that maybe, just maybe, certain countries simply can't stay in one piece except through coercion - and that the only alternative to the centralized coercion of a single strongman is the fragmented coercion of multiple strongmen.
But as always, the worst heresy inside the Beltway is any hint of belief that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Long after the rest of the world - including the American people themselves - have shed their last illusions about the unchanging realities of human nature, one day even our own ruling class might not merely get it, too, but actually admit it.
Per today's updates, it's still to be seen whether this breakthrough will translate into a sustainable supply corridor being opened up to the rebel-held enclave; some aid has apparently gone through already, but clearly not enough to significantly tip the scales against the regime:
But little has changed for the besieged residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo neighborhoods, who have been enduring acute shortages of food and medicine, as the fighting remains too fierce for aid to be delivered, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and humanitarian workers operating in the area say.Perhaps more significantly, at least some remaining residents in opposition sectors are treating the rebel advance as an opportunity to flee, not hold out longer:
An official from Syrian Civil Defense, a voluntary search-and-rescue group also known as the White Helmets, confirmed that this was the case, adding that many residents wanted to leave eastern Aleppo once a secure road out was opened.That's likely because the rebel victory has already come at a political cost: it has solidified Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra Front as the central fighting force in the entire effort against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies in the north of the country. At the rate things are going, the terrorist group of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri will before long effectively run the opposition government, ensuring that it will be an international pariah. Many, probably most Aleppoans, don't want to die for such implacable extremists.
That's despite the fact that about ten days ago, Al Nusra Front had rebranded itself as Fatah al-Sham (Conquest of Syria) Front, severing its official ties with parent group Al Qaeda in an apparent move to exempt itself from proposed joint US-Russian airstrikes on ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. In the immediate wake of the schism, the whole motley collection of jihadist outfits throughout Idlib and western Aleppo provinces seemed to quickly coalesce around the new Fatah al-Sham to launch a new combined offensive effort to relieve their besieged allies in the east of Aleppo city - though this joint force still operated, as before, under the Islamist umbrella banner of the "Army of Conquest."
Nobody should have any illusions as to what this really means: with a minor tactical, largely cosmetic organizational adjustment, Al Qaeda in Syria has effectively removed the target sign for US airpower hanging on its back, and has thereby taken virtual command of the anti-Assad insurgency - comprised as it predominantly is of other militant Islamist groups which have long colluded with it, but not overtly so as to remain in Washington's good graces themselves.
While it's long been known that the lines between moderate Islamist militants and their more extreme jihadist cousins like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are blurry, Washington, with its intransigence in pursuing regime change against Assad since 2011, has for years misled the American and Western public into thinking that the Syrian civil war isn't in fact essentially a binary choice between a ruthless secular dictatorship and a violent reactionary theocracy.
In fact, this was the widely unacknowledged reason that three years ago this month, Barack Obama's infamous "red line" against Damascus on the use of chemical weapons proved to be a monumental bluff: as soon as Washington actually started drawing up war plans against Assad, it became crystal-clear to the deep state of the CIA and Pentagon that they were essentially being drafted to become Al Qaeda's air force in Syria. Realizing the political unacceptability of such a military intervention, Obama conveniently punted the decision to use force to a notoriously gridlocked Congress.
In lieu of direct action, the Obama administration opted for a halfhearted and ultimately fruitless program to train and equip a rebel proxy force to fight both Assad and, from early 2014, the rising threat of a particularly virulent Al Nusra offshoot, Islamic State (ISIS). More significantly, it stepped up lethal and non-lethal aid alike through various back channels in its regional Sunni allies to any number of vetted rebel outfits - in the full knowledge that this materiel could end up in the hands of extremists who just so happened to be better at killing pro-Assad personnel. This enabled the CIA and Pentagon to perpetuate the myth that there was still a credible non-jihadist alternative to the Assad regime: whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. In fact, the vaunted Free Syrian Army (FSA) was by then past its operational prime: without the infusion of fanatical jihadist blood into the insurgency's ranks throughout 2013-14, it's probable that the Iranian and Hezbollah-bolstered Assad regime would have been able to grind it into the dust with ruthless attrition.
Further, as ISIS became a more prominent regional threat, especially in Iraq, the US then ratcheted up the pressure through its Sunni allies, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to force a decisive conclusion to the Syrian civil war by securing, at long last, Assad's ouster. In early 2015, the newly formed Army of Conquest effectively combined the Islamist resistance forces of northwestern Syria into a single loose constellation, allowing the rebels to make such threatening advances on the regime's traditional strongholds in coastal Latakia province that Assad had to concede additional territory to ISIS and at the same time subcontract such a large chunk of his fighting to Hezbollah and other Iranian-sponsored Shia militias that Damascus was effectively reduced to a satrap of Tehran (a condition unacceptable to the Baath government and one of the main reasons it lobbied Putin for Moscow's intervention).
At this juncture, Washington was drawing up its coup de grâce: a no-fly zone in northern Syria that would ground Assad's air force and ensure a speedy insurgent takeover of the remainder of Idlib province and even much of Latakia province (the prize being the port of Latakia itself). Needless to say, this is where American leaders and policymakers underestimated so badly the extent of Russia's determination to not let its sole naval access point in the eastern Mediterranean fall to a Sunni fundamentalist Western proxy.
Through all these developments, the Syrian conflict had steadily morphed from a democratic revolution to a radical Islamic insurrection. Such a plain fact was lost on no one, but from the get-go it has presented the world's sole superpower with a vexing dilemma: it couldn't countenance any future for Syria with Assad in the picture in any way, shape, or form; yet as the war dragged on, the strongest impetus for eliminating the Baath regime came increasingly from forces who were no less hostile to Western liberal democratic values. The Obama administration walked a tightrope: it absolutely needed the battlefield pressure that extremists like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham were applying on Damascus, yet it had to minimize their ultimate political role in Syria's transition. As the fight for Aleppo intensifies to a crescendo, it becomes clear that this practically impossible balancing act has always depended to a large extent on the ultimate fate of that city in particular.
Without control of a major urban center, the Syrian opposition has little credible leverage in the political settlement sponsored by the UN at Geneva: it thus follows that not only must it retain control of its sector of Aleppo, but it must also keep itself as free of radical jihadist influence as possible. The embattled remnants of the Syrian revolution - still defiantly clinging to a vision of the country free of both Assad and Islamic extremism - have essentially staked all their bets on riding out the long storm engulfing the country's second city and longtime commercial hub.
For this reason, rebel forces in and around Aleppo city have been disproportionately of the secular revolutionary variety - FSA and similar outfits - for much longer than most anywhere else in Syria. Even the local Islamist units are fiercely opposed not merely to ISIS, but have battled Al Nusra and its affiliates as well.
The latest developments in Aleppo could therefore be at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Syrian opposition: the return of Al Qaeda and its kindred Salafist spirits - even under a new local name - means that acknowledged terrorist bands are playing a key, even central, role in shaping the outcome of the most critical battle of the war. That could throw a monkey wrench into the opposition's hopes for a united front at the Geneva talks.
The immediate situation is that the battle appears far from over: the independent Russian strategic news service Southfront reports that the jihadists haven't truly secured the supply route they've claimed to open, as they must first clear varied pockets of regime regulars and pro-regime militias in their immediate vicinity. Given Russo-Syrian airpower, it may be difficult to utilize the corridor even if they do.
Moving further on out from here, even if the jihadists prevail and genuinely lift the siege, one must wonder how kindly they and their sympathizers (who have probably grown exponentially within Aleppo city in the last couple of weeks) will take to being undercut by the politically favored yet militarily toothless secular elements of the opposition during peace negotiations under watchful US sponsorship.
Obama doubtless hopes that even if US aims in Syria are subjected to the desires of radicals who are cut from the same cloth as those that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 - not to mention those whose head-chopping and child-molesting exploits have earned a name for themselves - that yet somehow the world and the American public can still be led to believe that the five-and-a-half year Syrian civil war could end in a democratic third way.
The US left Afghanistan over a quarter-century ago because it was assumed that just because our friends in Kabul wore Western suits and ties and had the right "free-market capitalist" inclinations, then it didn't matter that so many heavily armed warlords who actually ruled the vast countryside were such irreconcilable antitheses to the very notions of secularism and liberalism. In the years since, you'd think our richly checkered experiences of nation-building in the Islamic world would've instilled the hard lesson at Langley, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and so on that maybe, just maybe, certain countries simply can't stay in one piece except through coercion - and that the only alternative to the centralized coercion of a single strongman is the fragmented coercion of multiple strongmen.
But as always, the worst heresy inside the Beltway is any hint of belief that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Long after the rest of the world - including the American people themselves - have shed their last illusions about the unchanging realities of human nature, one day even our own ruling class might not merely get it, too, but actually admit it.
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