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.
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