Less than a week after it began, the Syrian ceasefire hangs by a bare thread.
Pro-regime airstrikes have resumed against rebel-held eastern Aleppo, a day after a US-led coalition raid apparently mistakenly killed scores of Syrian government troops. This against the backdrop of what the Russians claim to be preparations by the rebels for a new counterattack to break the government siege of Aleppo.
The US-led airstrike at remote eastern desert outpost Deir el-Zour on Saturday the 17th is highly problematic: even assuming that the target was thought to be an ISIS facility, it would have been an extremely rare (if not very first) instance of an American raid on the terror group in an area where its only opponent on the ground is the Syrian army. Just what in the world were American and coalition airmen effectively trying to help the Assad regime for?
As such, the incident will probably go down with the Syrian and Russian public as a deliberate provocation - a propaganda coup that Damascus and Moscow are both clearly pushing through their respective state media, so as to gain political cover to become even more inflexible regarding the nebulous sticking points of the ceasefire on their end, namely the delivery of humanitarian aid to east Aleppo. And today's resumption of airstrikes against the besieged rebel enclave is an indication that they're ready to take the kid gloves off.
Having already apologized for the botched raid, the US is now protesting that it in fact notified the Russians in advance about it; while this indicates a lack of coordination between the Russian command in Syria and the regime's local units which were hit, it's sure to give Moscow a pretext to demand that Washington restrict the Western coalition's air activity in the general area of Deir el-Zour (until such time as the joint operations center against ISIS and Al Nusra is established, if at all).
The Axis of Fatima - the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus nexus - was in a clear position of military strength when it acceded to the September 9 accord between John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov; Damascus at least may now have decided that it's time to repay the Deir el-Zour incident by reminding the rebels and their US and Saudi backers just how inferior their bargaining position is in the main Aleppo theater.
Since both sides have reportedly been breaking the truce here and there for days already, the Syrian regime can now resume "barrel bomb" attacks on eastern Aleppo while still appearing reasonably committed to a general "cessation of hostilities" - after all, no rational party can take so much provocation lying down, however otherwise it remains open to peaceful resolution. That makes it more likely that the rebels will respond in kind, and before long a new cycle of escalation will bring a nasty end to the ceasefire altogether. As of this moment, it will be a miracle if anything remains of the truce at all in another week's time.
Obama and Kerry can now plead all they want with Putin and Lavrov that one unfortunate incident doesn't tip the balance of onus for full implementation of the truce against the US; more realistically, events this past weekend will constrict Washington's freedom of action on the Syrian issue even more in relation to its desired end goal of a pro-Western democracy.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Friday, September 16, 2016
Syrian ceasefire may only delay a crushing US defeat by Russia
Despite a five-day lull in most of the fighting in Syria on account of the latest US-Russia ceasefire deal, a large-scale resumption of the conflict looks increasingly likely to break out as early as next week, notwithstanding the mutual interest of Washington and Moscow to continue with further incremental truces (i.e. 48-72 hours).
That's because the fundamental underlying disagreement looks increasingly impossible to resolve: the US simply won't impose costs on the so-called "moderate rebels" for not breaking cleanly with the former Al Nusra Front, and until it proves it will, there's absolutely no reason for Russia to ease the Assad regime's stranglehold on Aleppo by allowing humanitarian supplies to reach the besieged rebel eastern sector of the key city which is the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war.
Indeed, Moscow and Damascus now have every pretext to strengthen, not loosen, their encirclement of Aleppo: should they finally lose patience with American and Saudi foot-dragging over the "moderate rebel" impasse, they must be in a strong position to rapidly re-escalate their aerial bombardment of the civilian support infrastructure of eastern Aleppo in such a way that the 300,000 anti-government residents there can readily be forced into a "surrender-or-starve" choice.
This was, after all, the dire prospect that the entire anti-Assad insurgency and, even more to the point, its US and regional Sunni backers, found themselves facing when they desperately tried to secure a truce last week - and ultimately did so only at the price of agreeing to severe Russian and Syrian demands to completely cut off Al Nusra, which they're now clearly loathe to follow through on.
As a consequence, it now appears increasingly likely that all the ceasefire will end up doing is delaying the US-backed opposition's inevitable final rout from Aleppo by an additional two to four weeks. Putin and Assad can't sit on their thumbs forever. They know exactly what they're looking for, which with each passing day becomes more and more remote a prospect: that Al Nusra and its closest extremist affiliates will finally get booted out of the joint operational command center of the umbrella Islamist militant coalition called Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), which has dominated the anti-Assad insurgency in northern Syria since its formation in early 2015.
In other words, what should now be taking place is a full-scale purge of the most powerful rebel coalition's best commanders and intelligence operatives - because they're members of Al Nusra. But quite the contrary, it appears that other key Sunni fundamentalist factions which comprise the Army of Conquest (notably the proto-Taliban Ahrar al-Sham) have put their own feet down in support of Al Nusra - they have expressly refused to join the ceasefire at all. In doing so, they've made it practically impossible to meaningfully distinguish a "moderate" rebel group from an "extremist" one: not only are these jihadist bedfellows of Al Nusra effectively a clandestine liaison between the suicidal fanatics and the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA), but it's so obvious to just about anyone observing the conflict in northern Syria that even among the secular remnants of the original Arab spring and Syrian revolution, Al Nusra itself has gained tremendous popularity and legitimacy.
All this makes it quite clear that both "moderate" and "extremist" rebels still hope to maintain maximum ambiguity as to what distinction can be drawn between them on the battlefield - and by extension, that they still want to use the truce to strengthen themselves so as to become capable of breaking the regime's siege of Aleppo yet again.
When the US agreed to crack down on the insurgency's links to Al Nusra a week ago, it did so knowing that arm-twisting its proxies into compliance would be difficult to impossible - yet for Kerry and ultimately Obama, even this was far better than an unchecked Russo-Syrian onslaught that could well have obliterated much of the remainder of eastern Aleppo by now, unleashing another few tens of thousands of refugees.
Now, just a week later, and barely five days into the actual cessation of hostilities, the clock is already ticking down - fast. The US has reportedly threatened Russia that it will pull out of the agreement to jointly bomb Al Nusra (and ISIS for that matter) if humanitarian aid to Aleppo remains blocked as of early next week; this is obviously a media ploy to make it sound as though Moscow and Damascus are the parties blocking the path to resolving the Syrian conflict.
But in fact, it's obvious why the Russians are now making such hay about Washington deliberately withholding the actual terms of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement of September 9 from the rest of the world, not least the UN: disclosing these would unmistakably show that over the past week, it's actually been the US which has completely failed to keep its promise to extirpate from the Syrian opposition its CIA and Pentagon-brokered Al Nusra links.
And so here we are - Moscow and Washington once again reduced to making veiled (and soon not-so-veiled) threats or ultimatums against each other.
Except it's Putin's Kremlin whose guns are actually loaded to back up its diplomatic pressure, while Obama in the White House remains - as ever - essentially clueless as to the sheer futility of leaving policy implementation and details to his entrenched Beltway bureaucracy, which appears more set than ever on its course of suicidal stumbling into the claws of the Russian bear.
That's because the fundamental underlying disagreement looks increasingly impossible to resolve: the US simply won't impose costs on the so-called "moderate rebels" for not breaking cleanly with the former Al Nusra Front, and until it proves it will, there's absolutely no reason for Russia to ease the Assad regime's stranglehold on Aleppo by allowing humanitarian supplies to reach the besieged rebel eastern sector of the key city which is the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war.
Indeed, Moscow and Damascus now have every pretext to strengthen, not loosen, their encirclement of Aleppo: should they finally lose patience with American and Saudi foot-dragging over the "moderate rebel" impasse, they must be in a strong position to rapidly re-escalate their aerial bombardment of the civilian support infrastructure of eastern Aleppo in such a way that the 300,000 anti-government residents there can readily be forced into a "surrender-or-starve" choice.
This was, after all, the dire prospect that the entire anti-Assad insurgency and, even more to the point, its US and regional Sunni backers, found themselves facing when they desperately tried to secure a truce last week - and ultimately did so only at the price of agreeing to severe Russian and Syrian demands to completely cut off Al Nusra, which they're now clearly loathe to follow through on.
As a consequence, it now appears increasingly likely that all the ceasefire will end up doing is delaying the US-backed opposition's inevitable final rout from Aleppo by an additional two to four weeks. Putin and Assad can't sit on their thumbs forever. They know exactly what they're looking for, which with each passing day becomes more and more remote a prospect: that Al Nusra and its closest extremist affiliates will finally get booted out of the joint operational command center of the umbrella Islamist militant coalition called Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), which has dominated the anti-Assad insurgency in northern Syria since its formation in early 2015.
In other words, what should now be taking place is a full-scale purge of the most powerful rebel coalition's best commanders and intelligence operatives - because they're members of Al Nusra. But quite the contrary, it appears that other key Sunni fundamentalist factions which comprise the Army of Conquest (notably the proto-Taliban Ahrar al-Sham) have put their own feet down in support of Al Nusra - they have expressly refused to join the ceasefire at all. In doing so, they've made it practically impossible to meaningfully distinguish a "moderate" rebel group from an "extremist" one: not only are these jihadist bedfellows of Al Nusra effectively a clandestine liaison between the suicidal fanatics and the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA), but it's so obvious to just about anyone observing the conflict in northern Syria that even among the secular remnants of the original Arab spring and Syrian revolution, Al Nusra itself has gained tremendous popularity and legitimacy.
All this makes it quite clear that both "moderate" and "extremist" rebels still hope to maintain maximum ambiguity as to what distinction can be drawn between them on the battlefield - and by extension, that they still want to use the truce to strengthen themselves so as to become capable of breaking the regime's siege of Aleppo yet again.
When the US agreed to crack down on the insurgency's links to Al Nusra a week ago, it did so knowing that arm-twisting its proxies into compliance would be difficult to impossible - yet for Kerry and ultimately Obama, even this was far better than an unchecked Russo-Syrian onslaught that could well have obliterated much of the remainder of eastern Aleppo by now, unleashing another few tens of thousands of refugees.
Now, just a week later, and barely five days into the actual cessation of hostilities, the clock is already ticking down - fast. The US has reportedly threatened Russia that it will pull out of the agreement to jointly bomb Al Nusra (and ISIS for that matter) if humanitarian aid to Aleppo remains blocked as of early next week; this is obviously a media ploy to make it sound as though Moscow and Damascus are the parties blocking the path to resolving the Syrian conflict.
But in fact, it's obvious why the Russians are now making such hay about Washington deliberately withholding the actual terms of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement of September 9 from the rest of the world, not least the UN: disclosing these would unmistakably show that over the past week, it's actually been the US which has completely failed to keep its promise to extirpate from the Syrian opposition its CIA and Pentagon-brokered Al Nusra links.
And so here we are - Moscow and Washington once again reduced to making veiled (and soon not-so-veiled) threats or ultimatums against each other.
Except it's Putin's Kremlin whose guns are actually loaded to back up its diplomatic pressure, while Obama in the White House remains - as ever - essentially clueless as to the sheer futility of leaving policy implementation and details to his entrenched Beltway bureaucracy, which appears more set than ever on its course of suicidal stumbling into the claws of the Russian bear.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Will latest Syrian ceasefire work?
The US and Russia have struck a new truce after another round of marathon diplomacy between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Effective September 12, Assad will stop bombing rebel-held areas while Washington will join Moscow's air campaign against Al Nusra Front as well as ISIS.
For the US, a deal was very badly and urgently needed for the second time in little more than half a year, as its rebel proxies were again on the verge of complete defeat in and around the strategically crucial city of Aleppo, which over the course of 2016 has become the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year conflict. Though this latest cessation of hostilities arguably buys time once more for the stubborn insurgency against Assad to recover and gather strength for the next round of fighting, one can easily see why the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers could use a breather, as well.
Putin and Assad will seek to use the truce to lock down their renewed encirclement of rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which has just been reimposed in recent days after a month-long breach by Al Nusra and its allies. Given how dangerously exhausting the back-and-forth fighting around the city has been in the last two months for his badly overextended army, Assad has good reason to bring his expenditures of blood and treasure down to a bare minimum, while securing as much political cover as possible for his hard-fought, then forfeited, and then finally recovered territorial gains. By finally joining forces with Russia against Al Nusra, the US has signaled that it has overruled rebel aspirations to militarily wrest the city from the regime, as such an effort has become utterly dependent on Al Nusra and its extremist affiliates.
Instead, the remaining secular and "moderate" Islamist opposition must now dissociate completely from the fanatical jihadists whose battlefield prowess has made them increasingly popular with their own constituents. This could be a major stumbling block to renewed peace negotiations at Geneva. However, it's one thing to admire Al Nusra diehards because they give pro-regime forces such hell; it's something else altogether to actually join them. Both Moscow and Washington must be hoping that their alliance against Al Nusra, even if hazy on the specifics, will at least force on all Sunni jihadists a choice of whether to throw in their lot with an implacable aspiring emirate (or even caliphate) or instead take a gamble on a political process that restricts their leverage against the Syrian regime.
It's precisely this loss of precious leverage - given how prominent Al Nusra has become to the whole anti-Assad insurgency - that was clearly the biggest objection raised by those elements in the Washington bureaucracy, that is to say the CIA and the residual neocon holdouts of the State and Defense Departments, against any deal with the Kremlin whatsoever. On the surface, the very fact that this agreement actually pulled through at all is an initial indication of their crushing defeat.
More realistically, though, since Kerry deliberated intensively and for hours on end with the agreement's US governmental stakeholders - read: the neocon bureaucrats - before giving Lavrov the final go-ahead, these sore losers grilled him mercilessly to try to tweak the implementation of the new truce yet again against the Russians. In fact this is definitely why it took so long: one can easily imagine the vicious back-and-forth wrangling between poor Kerry and CIA director John Brennan as well as Defense Secretary Ash Carter, both of whom essentially consider Putin, not ISIS, as the true existential threat to America.
In the end, Kerry would have had to lay down the law: "Look guys, this is our last chance...if we don't get this deal tonight, the Syrian revolution will be exterminated...how many times do I have to repeat that we are NOT going to escalate a proxy war against the Kremlin?? We don't even have the Turks to help us do that anymore! I cannot offer Mr. Lavrov anything that the Russians will soon find out to be our duplicity or trickery...we cut off Al Nusra NOW and FOREVER, and live with the consequences of that...because the only alternatives are far worse...that is final!"
So will the latest Syrian ceasefire work? The answer probably rests on one thing and perhaps only one thing: Will Obama finally be able to rein in his deep-state apparatus?
Or perhaps Syria will actually work out in his last months in office, but that embittered apparatus will instead strike in Ukraine. The last thing anyone can expect is for it to take a humiliating blow lying down...someone, somewhere, must pay for this gut-wrenching Syrian fiasco in blood.
For the US, a deal was very badly and urgently needed for the second time in little more than half a year, as its rebel proxies were again on the verge of complete defeat in and around the strategically crucial city of Aleppo, which over the course of 2016 has become the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year conflict. Though this latest cessation of hostilities arguably buys time once more for the stubborn insurgency against Assad to recover and gather strength for the next round of fighting, one can easily see why the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers could use a breather, as well.
Putin and Assad will seek to use the truce to lock down their renewed encirclement of rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which has just been reimposed in recent days after a month-long breach by Al Nusra and its allies. Given how dangerously exhausting the back-and-forth fighting around the city has been in the last two months for his badly overextended army, Assad has good reason to bring his expenditures of blood and treasure down to a bare minimum, while securing as much political cover as possible for his hard-fought, then forfeited, and then finally recovered territorial gains. By finally joining forces with Russia against Al Nusra, the US has signaled that it has overruled rebel aspirations to militarily wrest the city from the regime, as such an effort has become utterly dependent on Al Nusra and its extremist affiliates.
Instead, the remaining secular and "moderate" Islamist opposition must now dissociate completely from the fanatical jihadists whose battlefield prowess has made them increasingly popular with their own constituents. This could be a major stumbling block to renewed peace negotiations at Geneva. However, it's one thing to admire Al Nusra diehards because they give pro-regime forces such hell; it's something else altogether to actually join them. Both Moscow and Washington must be hoping that their alliance against Al Nusra, even if hazy on the specifics, will at least force on all Sunni jihadists a choice of whether to throw in their lot with an implacable aspiring emirate (or even caliphate) or instead take a gamble on a political process that restricts their leverage against the Syrian regime.
It's precisely this loss of precious leverage - given how prominent Al Nusra has become to the whole anti-Assad insurgency - that was clearly the biggest objection raised by those elements in the Washington bureaucracy, that is to say the CIA and the residual neocon holdouts of the State and Defense Departments, against any deal with the Kremlin whatsoever. On the surface, the very fact that this agreement actually pulled through at all is an initial indication of their crushing defeat.
More realistically, though, since Kerry deliberated intensively and for hours on end with the agreement's US governmental stakeholders - read: the neocon bureaucrats - before giving Lavrov the final go-ahead, these sore losers grilled him mercilessly to try to tweak the implementation of the new truce yet again against the Russians. In fact this is definitely why it took so long: one can easily imagine the vicious back-and-forth wrangling between poor Kerry and CIA director John Brennan as well as Defense Secretary Ash Carter, both of whom essentially consider Putin, not ISIS, as the true existential threat to America.
In the end, Kerry would have had to lay down the law: "Look guys, this is our last chance...if we don't get this deal tonight, the Syrian revolution will be exterminated...how many times do I have to repeat that we are NOT going to escalate a proxy war against the Kremlin?? We don't even have the Turks to help us do that anymore! I cannot offer Mr. Lavrov anything that the Russians will soon find out to be our duplicity or trickery...we cut off Al Nusra NOW and FOREVER, and live with the consequences of that...because the only alternatives are far worse...that is final!"
So will the latest Syrian ceasefire work? The answer probably rests on one thing and perhaps only one thing: Will Obama finally be able to rein in his deep-state apparatus?
Or perhaps Syria will actually work out in his last months in office, but that embittered apparatus will instead strike in Ukraine. The last thing anyone can expect is for it to take a humiliating blow lying down...someone, somewhere, must pay for this gut-wrenching Syrian fiasco in blood.
Friday, September 9, 2016
Lame-duck Obama may now be at Putin's mercy
Now that it seems all but certain that Obama will be unable to reach a grand accord with Putin, the window for a peaceful settlement of the crises in both Ukraine and Syria is steadily closing, opening up a small but growing possibility that both will explode in his final months in office.
By refusing to stand up to the deep state of the Beltway, which is furiously smarting from setbacks against Russia in the proxy wars of Ukraine and Syria, Obama may be sealing the fate of his legacy, at least in the short to medium term: instead of cutting its losses, the US is setting a firm course to lose even more hard-power influence in Europe and the Middle East.
In the coming days and weeks, as it becomes clear that Assad won't step down even as part of a political transition, his most implacable enemies - the CIA and the Saudis - will seriously consider launching a brand-new covert escalation of proxy warfare against Damascus and its allies Tehran and Moscow.
The problem? They've lost Turkey, since Erdogan has all but settled for his own sphere of influence in northern Syria at the Kurds' expense in return for backing off overthrowing Assad. And unless he can be convinced to risk an all-out war with Russian and Assad-backed Kurdish militants, he won't be swayed back into the regime-change-at-all-costs camp.
This puts Langley and Riyadh in a quandary: concede defeat, and their longstanding power-broking nexus in the region would suffer a seemingly fatal reputational blow with both allies and enemies; yet if they escalate with neither full buy-in from the Obama administration nor the critical cooperation of Ankara, they could bring an even worse reversal to overall American and Saudi interests than a mere loss of credibility. Unfortunately for Obama, he loses either way.
That's because the only sensible way forward at this point is to follow Turkey and get fully behind a deal with Russia: not only would it ensure the success of the main US objective of defeating ISIS, but it would give both the US and Saudi Arabia a similar opening to Turkey's to shape facts on the ground in that vast chunk of Syrian real estate that Assad has given up militarily recapturing.
Instead, caving to the sore losers inside the Beltway and their friends in Riyadh, the lame-duck president is reducing what little leverage America has left over the Syrian peace process to virtually nothing. This increases the chance that even he will finally get suckered into an ill-advised eleventh-hour military intervention against Assad, making a bad outcome for the US even worse. For one thing, such an act will give Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus a green light to mercilessly exterminate the remnants of the Syrian revolution from the face of the earth.
The inconvenient truth is that Mr. Assad enjoys far more support among the Syrian population than any one secular or Islamist opposition faction individually, and will thus retain enormous clout even in a future democratized and possibly federalized system. And because the long civil war has largely purged regime-dominated regions of dissent, even as it has also solidified Assad's standing as the most credible protector of its Christian, Druze, Shiite, and Alawite minorities, the Baath dictator probably has even more potential electoral support now than at any previous point of the conflict, when, before the Russian intervention, he perhaps would have acceded to Western demands to step down provided he be allowed to run for the presidency under a new constitution - which of course the CIA and its regional Sunni proxies have never considered an acceptable endgame.
Alas, if there's anything Obama should have learned by now about foreign policy, it's that unless he himself exercises decisive initiative on the world stage and as commander-in-chief, sooner or later he'll find himself dancing to someone else's tune. When he failed to enforce his infamous "red line" on Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013, i.e. by following through on what was essentially a pledge to appease his own defense-intelligence establishment, he effectively allowed himself to be corralled into the present quandary by Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs instead. Yet now, having refused to wholeheartedly embrace the Russo-Iranian program for Syria, he's left himself vulnerable to being yanked violently back the other way by the Beltway apparatus.
This same dynamic is no less true of Ukraine - a crisis which from the get-go has been intricately intertwined with the one in the Middle East.
There can now be little doubt that the unusually aggressive US effort to topple the democratically elected pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 - even despite its slide into police-state repression - was a direct consequence of the Washington establishment's desire for revenge against Moscow for one-upping it on the Syrian chemical weapons issue, which had thrown US-Saudi designs in the Levant haywire. When this new intervention, which offended Russian interests far more directly, predictably backfired, too, Obama was caught off guard yet again: it was as though he sleepwalked right into the bear's claws because he let the neocon war party operate his defense and foreign policy apparatus on virtual autopilot with regards to the ex-Soviet space.
Unsurprisingly, given how little stomach the American public has for expending blood or even treasure on places they can't even find on a map, Ukraine like Syria became another halfhearted interventionist quagmire for the White House in 2014, as the Kremlin punished American insolence in its frontyard by annexing Crimea and then taking a bite of eastern Ukraine proper.
The two Minsk accords - the first in September 2014 and the second in February 2015 - have thus far held a tenuous overall truce despite chronic spikes of violence between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region, on top of the occasional flareup of tensions around Crimea and over ethnic Russian strongholds like Odessa and the neighboring Russian-Moldovan enclave of Transnistria. But this uneasy draw may now be drawing to a close.
Having thoroughly - though hardly surprisingly - disappointed its Western sponsors with its essentially unreformed corrupt patronage system, the "pro-Europe" post-Maidan government in Kiev is standing on its last legs of legitimacy with both its own people and its foreign backers. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has now unilaterally essentially withdrawn from Minsk II by demanding that Russia relinquish control of the Donbas border even before any political concession is made with regards to the separatists' autonomy in a new federation. This follows a sharp increase in daily violence along the Ukrainian-separatist front lines that has held up all summer.
Yet more activity involving "ceasefires" or "truces" and international "monitors" is being reported with every passing week, and although Russia and Ukraine have thankfully moved back from the brink yet again after the latter's alleged sabotage incursion into Crimea last month, the overarching geopolitical situation which underpins the localized violence has only worsened, especially from Kiev's perspective.
The way things are going, by 2018 or 2019 at the latest, without an implementation of Minsk II, the breakaway Donbas People's Republic (DPR) will de facto have either set up a completely independent full-fledged government recognized by the Kremlin, or worse, Moscow will have finally said "to hell with you" to Kiev and annexed the region outright.
Poroshenko and Putin alike both see that the West's resolve in upholding its sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict is fraying at the seams, despite yet another renewal this summer; the true storm cloud which is gathering over the former, however, is that the clock is ticking on his powerful Western and American political support.
Should Donald Trump win the US presidency, it would embolden already-surging populists in France, Germany, and Italy in their 2017 and 2018 elections - and this on top of Brexit. Like Trump, these continental European neo-nationalists in particular are strongly opposed to the whole confrontation with Moscow, and in fact the Kremlin has for years cultivated ties with them to blunt Anglo-American leverage over the EU that's largely behind the anti-Russian tilt of the bloc.
The danger for Obama, then, is that if and when Trump appears to gain such traction over Hillary Clinton between now and November 8 that the bombastic billionaire's non-enmity towards or even admiration of Putin suddenly goes mainstream in America, Washington will be dealing with a badly cornered Ukrainian client and ally. Poroshenko won't be the problem: as an oligarch with political authority as well, he has far too much to lose making hay of a deteriorating situation vis-à-vis Moscow, and judging by his recent statements, has already come to terms with far weaker Western support in the near future. The problem rather will be the embattled Ukrainian leader's own increasingly restive right flank: a Putinist tilt on either side of the Atlantic could drive these nationalists (including fringe neo-fascists) into such a tizzy that they'll make it utterly impossible for Kiev to work with Moscow on Minsk II from a position of weakness; indeed, it's probably for this very reason that Poroshenko has already preempted them by shifting rightwards on Minsk II and demanded full Ukrainian sovereignty be returned unconditionally at the outset.
We can only speculate just how far Kiev will push the envelope, and in fact even the possibility of such a dire accommodation of Russian interests by a newly confrontation-weary Washington may be farfetched or premature; but again for Obama, the underlying tension and contradiction here is deeply rooted and solidly structured, giving him far less leeway or wiggle room to find any common ground or bridge to the opposing side than his idealistic view of how the world should work has steeled him for.
But alternately, it could well be Obama himself who, feeling hemmed in by the alleged Trump-Putin nexus so darkly promulgated by the Democratic party establishment, sees fit to double down on a new uncompromising stance on Ukraine: since the US isn't even party to Minsk II anyway, all this would take is an intransigent insistence from the White House that its French and German allies go along with Kiev's new hard line regarding the Russia-Donbas frontier.
And that's when all hell could break loose. Once certain that the West's treachery on Minsk II has been given the final certification from Obama personally, Putin will then have no reason to remain in an arrangement so utterly twisted to harm Russian security. Being ever careful, the ex-KGB spook won't be one to escalate beyond the necessary precautions, and in fact will exhaust all back channels to dial down the elevated tensions inevitably triggered by a Minsk meltdown; but at such a juncture, it's Barack Obama who will be strictly at the mercy of Providence.
Should the spark of some armed incident ignite, the outgoing 44th president of history's exceptional free and democratic society will be trapped into a fateful decision whether or not to enforce yet another awful "red line" well outside the bounds of vital American interests. Only this time, having been burned by everything that's transpired since the last "red line" retreat gave his archrival an opening to challenge American credibility in the first place, Obama will be doubly trapped into actually pulling the trigger for a change: inasmuch as he believes that American credibility is a vital national interest, and inasmuch as that credibility is tied to his own legacy as an effective leader of the free world, he may have no recourse but to charge head-on into the Russian ambush.
We can only hope and pray that even if Obama truly allows himself to be dragged into such an unmitigated disaster, that the effective powers-that-be over him will be governed by far sounder realpolitik and common strategic sense, so as to be on every lookout to give him (if not his successor) the easiest and quickest way out. Perhaps it will take a tragedy, but Putin won't miss such an opportunity to endear himself with the American elite and the American people alike.
By refusing to stand up to the deep state of the Beltway, which is furiously smarting from setbacks against Russia in the proxy wars of Ukraine and Syria, Obama may be sealing the fate of his legacy, at least in the short to medium term: instead of cutting its losses, the US is setting a firm course to lose even more hard-power influence in Europe and the Middle East.
In the coming days and weeks, as it becomes clear that Assad won't step down even as part of a political transition, his most implacable enemies - the CIA and the Saudis - will seriously consider launching a brand-new covert escalation of proxy warfare against Damascus and its allies Tehran and Moscow.
The problem? They've lost Turkey, since Erdogan has all but settled for his own sphere of influence in northern Syria at the Kurds' expense in return for backing off overthrowing Assad. And unless he can be convinced to risk an all-out war with Russian and Assad-backed Kurdish militants, he won't be swayed back into the regime-change-at-all-costs camp.
This puts Langley and Riyadh in a quandary: concede defeat, and their longstanding power-broking nexus in the region would suffer a seemingly fatal reputational blow with both allies and enemies; yet if they escalate with neither full buy-in from the Obama administration nor the critical cooperation of Ankara, they could bring an even worse reversal to overall American and Saudi interests than a mere loss of credibility. Unfortunately for Obama, he loses either way.
That's because the only sensible way forward at this point is to follow Turkey and get fully behind a deal with Russia: not only would it ensure the success of the main US objective of defeating ISIS, but it would give both the US and Saudi Arabia a similar opening to Turkey's to shape facts on the ground in that vast chunk of Syrian real estate that Assad has given up militarily recapturing.
Instead, caving to the sore losers inside the Beltway and their friends in Riyadh, the lame-duck president is reducing what little leverage America has left over the Syrian peace process to virtually nothing. This increases the chance that even he will finally get suckered into an ill-advised eleventh-hour military intervention against Assad, making a bad outcome for the US even worse. For one thing, such an act will give Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus a green light to mercilessly exterminate the remnants of the Syrian revolution from the face of the earth.
The inconvenient truth is that Mr. Assad enjoys far more support among the Syrian population than any one secular or Islamist opposition faction individually, and will thus retain enormous clout even in a future democratized and possibly federalized system. And because the long civil war has largely purged regime-dominated regions of dissent, even as it has also solidified Assad's standing as the most credible protector of its Christian, Druze, Shiite, and Alawite minorities, the Baath dictator probably has even more potential electoral support now than at any previous point of the conflict, when, before the Russian intervention, he perhaps would have acceded to Western demands to step down provided he be allowed to run for the presidency under a new constitution - which of course the CIA and its regional Sunni proxies have never considered an acceptable endgame.
Alas, if there's anything Obama should have learned by now about foreign policy, it's that unless he himself exercises decisive initiative on the world stage and as commander-in-chief, sooner or later he'll find himself dancing to someone else's tune. When he failed to enforce his infamous "red line" on Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013, i.e. by following through on what was essentially a pledge to appease his own defense-intelligence establishment, he effectively allowed himself to be corralled into the present quandary by Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs instead. Yet now, having refused to wholeheartedly embrace the Russo-Iranian program for Syria, he's left himself vulnerable to being yanked violently back the other way by the Beltway apparatus.
This same dynamic is no less true of Ukraine - a crisis which from the get-go has been intricately intertwined with the one in the Middle East.
There can now be little doubt that the unusually aggressive US effort to topple the democratically elected pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 - even despite its slide into police-state repression - was a direct consequence of the Washington establishment's desire for revenge against Moscow for one-upping it on the Syrian chemical weapons issue, which had thrown US-Saudi designs in the Levant haywire. When this new intervention, which offended Russian interests far more directly, predictably backfired, too, Obama was caught off guard yet again: it was as though he sleepwalked right into the bear's claws because he let the neocon war party operate his defense and foreign policy apparatus on virtual autopilot with regards to the ex-Soviet space.
Unsurprisingly, given how little stomach the American public has for expending blood or even treasure on places they can't even find on a map, Ukraine like Syria became another halfhearted interventionist quagmire for the White House in 2014, as the Kremlin punished American insolence in its frontyard by annexing Crimea and then taking a bite of eastern Ukraine proper.
The two Minsk accords - the first in September 2014 and the second in February 2015 - have thus far held a tenuous overall truce despite chronic spikes of violence between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region, on top of the occasional flareup of tensions around Crimea and over ethnic Russian strongholds like Odessa and the neighboring Russian-Moldovan enclave of Transnistria. But this uneasy draw may now be drawing to a close.
Having thoroughly - though hardly surprisingly - disappointed its Western sponsors with its essentially unreformed corrupt patronage system, the "pro-Europe" post-Maidan government in Kiev is standing on its last legs of legitimacy with both its own people and its foreign backers. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has now unilaterally essentially withdrawn from Minsk II by demanding that Russia relinquish control of the Donbas border even before any political concession is made with regards to the separatists' autonomy in a new federation. This follows a sharp increase in daily violence along the Ukrainian-separatist front lines that has held up all summer.
Yet more activity involving "ceasefires" or "truces" and international "monitors" is being reported with every passing week, and although Russia and Ukraine have thankfully moved back from the brink yet again after the latter's alleged sabotage incursion into Crimea last month, the overarching geopolitical situation which underpins the localized violence has only worsened, especially from Kiev's perspective.
The way things are going, by 2018 or 2019 at the latest, without an implementation of Minsk II, the breakaway Donbas People's Republic (DPR) will de facto have either set up a completely independent full-fledged government recognized by the Kremlin, or worse, Moscow will have finally said "to hell with you" to Kiev and annexed the region outright.
Poroshenko and Putin alike both see that the West's resolve in upholding its sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict is fraying at the seams, despite yet another renewal this summer; the true storm cloud which is gathering over the former, however, is that the clock is ticking on his powerful Western and American political support.
Should Donald Trump win the US presidency, it would embolden already-surging populists in France, Germany, and Italy in their 2017 and 2018 elections - and this on top of Brexit. Like Trump, these continental European neo-nationalists in particular are strongly opposed to the whole confrontation with Moscow, and in fact the Kremlin has for years cultivated ties with them to blunt Anglo-American leverage over the EU that's largely behind the anti-Russian tilt of the bloc.
The danger for Obama, then, is that if and when Trump appears to gain such traction over Hillary Clinton between now and November 8 that the bombastic billionaire's non-enmity towards or even admiration of Putin suddenly goes mainstream in America, Washington will be dealing with a badly cornered Ukrainian client and ally. Poroshenko won't be the problem: as an oligarch with political authority as well, he has far too much to lose making hay of a deteriorating situation vis-à-vis Moscow, and judging by his recent statements, has already come to terms with far weaker Western support in the near future. The problem rather will be the embattled Ukrainian leader's own increasingly restive right flank: a Putinist tilt on either side of the Atlantic could drive these nationalists (including fringe neo-fascists) into such a tizzy that they'll make it utterly impossible for Kiev to work with Moscow on Minsk II from a position of weakness; indeed, it's probably for this very reason that Poroshenko has already preempted them by shifting rightwards on Minsk II and demanded full Ukrainian sovereignty be returned unconditionally at the outset.
We can only speculate just how far Kiev will push the envelope, and in fact even the possibility of such a dire accommodation of Russian interests by a newly confrontation-weary Washington may be farfetched or premature; but again for Obama, the underlying tension and contradiction here is deeply rooted and solidly structured, giving him far less leeway or wiggle room to find any common ground or bridge to the opposing side than his idealistic view of how the world should work has steeled him for.
But alternately, it could well be Obama himself who, feeling hemmed in by the alleged Trump-Putin nexus so darkly promulgated by the Democratic party establishment, sees fit to double down on a new uncompromising stance on Ukraine: since the US isn't even party to Minsk II anyway, all this would take is an intransigent insistence from the White House that its French and German allies go along with Kiev's new hard line regarding the Russia-Donbas frontier.
And that's when all hell could break loose. Once certain that the West's treachery on Minsk II has been given the final certification from Obama personally, Putin will then have no reason to remain in an arrangement so utterly twisted to harm Russian security. Being ever careful, the ex-KGB spook won't be one to escalate beyond the necessary precautions, and in fact will exhaust all back channels to dial down the elevated tensions inevitably triggered by a Minsk meltdown; but at such a juncture, it's Barack Obama who will be strictly at the mercy of Providence.
Should the spark of some armed incident ignite, the outgoing 44th president of history's exceptional free and democratic society will be trapped into a fateful decision whether or not to enforce yet another awful "red line" well outside the bounds of vital American interests. Only this time, having been burned by everything that's transpired since the last "red line" retreat gave his archrival an opening to challenge American credibility in the first place, Obama will be doubly trapped into actually pulling the trigger for a change: inasmuch as he believes that American credibility is a vital national interest, and inasmuch as that credibility is tied to his own legacy as an effective leader of the free world, he may have no recourse but to charge head-on into the Russian ambush.
We can only hope and pray that even if Obama truly allows himself to be dragged into such an unmitigated disaster, that the effective powers-that-be over him will be governed by far sounder realpolitik and common strategic sense, so as to be on every lookout to give him (if not his successor) the easiest and quickest way out. Perhaps it will take a tragedy, but Putin won't miss such an opportunity to endear himself with the American elite and the American people alike.
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
Why Hillary will be softer on Putin than Trump
For all her tough talk of confronting Russian aggression and her dark insinuations about a Putin-Trump nexus, even a quick assessment leads to the unmistakable conclusion that Hillary Clinton will tend to go it easier on the Kremlin - far easier, probably - than Donald Trump.
As her husband bashed the elder Bush for "coddling tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing", yet was soon acting as if he were completely bought and paid for by the Chinese communist regime, we're likely to see just as quick and complete a reversal from Hillary with respect to Moscow - because the only alternative outcome is World War III, and obviously she's not suicidal.
Leaving aside the fact that Hillary's history of deal and influence-peddling for Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs has been well documented by Clinton Cash and other exposés of the "pay-to-play" Clinton Foundation, it's easy to see why, despite all outward appearances, Putin might actually prefer America's first female president to its first purely private-citizen one.
First and foremost, Mrs. Clinton's primary foreign-policy focus will be her progressive socioeconomic agenda, not the age-old geopolitical contest between great powers. In this respect she will probably exceed even Obama, whose relative indifference to realpolitik over the last seven and a half years has already been a key factor in Washington's creeping strategic decline in the key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia - in the face of accelerating Russian, Iranian, and Chinese expansionism, respectively.
To wit, Secretary Hillary's aggressive pursuit of regime change in Libya in 2011 and her earlier support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a first-term Senator were as much predicated on her antipathy towards brutal dictators from a humanitarian perspective as they were on any sound strategic sense (which in hindsight was clearly lacking on both sides of the aisle). It helped in those particular cases, of course, that America attacked a largely defenseless adversary - just as her husband did Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, also for an ostensibly humanitarian motive.
Against adversaries that can actually impose real costs on American intervention, however, there's little reason to believe Hillary will have any more stomach for risk of loss than either Obama or Bill for that matter - and in fact good grounds to think she'll have even less.
That's because authoritarian regimes have gotten ever shrewder at incremental concessions, especially with regards to the standard Western concerns of human rights and civil liberties. This means a Hillary Clinton administration will have its hands full responding to all manner of "reform" and "liberalization" peddled by dictatorships as proof of their goodness - through the considerable influence channels they've acquired abroad, including in the US itself.
We can already see this kind of dynamic in play with Iran. The Islamic fundamentalist regime has so blatantly resorted to extorting hard cash in exchange for releasing American prisoners - even considering that this has transpired in the context of the gradual easing of sanctions on it - that it's only logical to expect it to adopt similar ploys with regards to its own native dissidents, thousands of whom are still rotting in its jails. Tellingly, this has all taken place amidst an ever weaker American resolve - if any is left at all - to check Tehran from acquiring regional hegemony over the coming decade or so. And that's Iran - orders of magnitude weaker in the face of American power than either China or Russia.
Cynically, one might even speculate that much of the intensifying repression of authoritarian regimes all over the world is based neither on irrational fear nor on arrogant overconfidence, but more mundanely simply to stack up bargaining chips that can be used later to extract concessions from a reliably gullible West.
And as a liberal, feminist woman, Hillary is likely to be far more inclined to grant such concessions than the blowhard, take-no-prisoners macho-chauvinist Mr. Trump. After all, that's essentially what she's running on.
As her husband bashed the elder Bush for "coddling tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing", yet was soon acting as if he were completely bought and paid for by the Chinese communist regime, we're likely to see just as quick and complete a reversal from Hillary with respect to Moscow - because the only alternative outcome is World War III, and obviously she's not suicidal.
Leaving aside the fact that Hillary's history of deal and influence-peddling for Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs has been well documented by Clinton Cash and other exposés of the "pay-to-play" Clinton Foundation, it's easy to see why, despite all outward appearances, Putin might actually prefer America's first female president to its first purely private-citizen one.
First and foremost, Mrs. Clinton's primary foreign-policy focus will be her progressive socioeconomic agenda, not the age-old geopolitical contest between great powers. In this respect she will probably exceed even Obama, whose relative indifference to realpolitik over the last seven and a half years has already been a key factor in Washington's creeping strategic decline in the key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia - in the face of accelerating Russian, Iranian, and Chinese expansionism, respectively.
To wit, Secretary Hillary's aggressive pursuit of regime change in Libya in 2011 and her earlier support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a first-term Senator were as much predicated on her antipathy towards brutal dictators from a humanitarian perspective as they were on any sound strategic sense (which in hindsight was clearly lacking on both sides of the aisle). It helped in those particular cases, of course, that America attacked a largely defenseless adversary - just as her husband did Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, also for an ostensibly humanitarian motive.
Against adversaries that can actually impose real costs on American intervention, however, there's little reason to believe Hillary will have any more stomach for risk of loss than either Obama or Bill for that matter - and in fact good grounds to think she'll have even less.
That's because authoritarian regimes have gotten ever shrewder at incremental concessions, especially with regards to the standard Western concerns of human rights and civil liberties. This means a Hillary Clinton administration will have its hands full responding to all manner of "reform" and "liberalization" peddled by dictatorships as proof of their goodness - through the considerable influence channels they've acquired abroad, including in the US itself.
We can already see this kind of dynamic in play with Iran. The Islamic fundamentalist regime has so blatantly resorted to extorting hard cash in exchange for releasing American prisoners - even considering that this has transpired in the context of the gradual easing of sanctions on it - that it's only logical to expect it to adopt similar ploys with regards to its own native dissidents, thousands of whom are still rotting in its jails. Tellingly, this has all taken place amidst an ever weaker American resolve - if any is left at all - to check Tehran from acquiring regional hegemony over the coming decade or so. And that's Iran - orders of magnitude weaker in the face of American power than either China or Russia.
Cynically, one might even speculate that much of the intensifying repression of authoritarian regimes all over the world is based neither on irrational fear nor on arrogant overconfidence, but more mundanely simply to stack up bargaining chips that can be used later to extract concessions from a reliably gullible West.
And as a liberal, feminist woman, Hillary is likely to be far more inclined to grant such concessions than the blowhard, take-no-prisoners macho-chauvinist Mr. Trump. After all, that's essentially what she's running on.
Monday, September 5, 2016
Putin takes Obama to school in China (captioned photo series)
At the G20 in Hangzhou, China, the following snapshots of an initially icy but ultimately nuanced exchange between the leader of the free world and that of the emergent authoritarian axis may go down as the essence of Obama's global geopolitical legacy. (The captions are my own interpretation of what transpired as Putin took Obama to school - not just on the immediate matter at hand of the Syrian crisis, but more generally the unchanging norms of global realpolitik.)
Barack: Look at you, you pathetic little Russkie twerp...remember I can kick your a** on the basketball court if this really has to get nasty...let me remind you that I'm still the president of the world's only superpower...don't think for a moment that your pint-sized gas station posing as a proper G20 economy (now that I've kicked you out of the G8) can actually challenge our dominance of Europe or the Middle East, let alone both! For the last time - tell Assad he has to get his own and his entire extended family's behinds the hell out of Syria, or there will be consequences!
Vladimir: Er, are you feeling okay, dear Barack? We're here to try to meet in the middle on restarting the peace process, remember? We don't need threats now, do we?
Barack: Okay, let's cut the bullcr*p, Vlad. We had a deal that you were going to pause that son-of-a-bitch eye doctor's barrel bombing of women and children in Aleppo and elsewhere first...and only then can we plausibly work together again on the negotiations between our minions that last flopped a little while back...we've bent over backwards to concede to your blackmail on joining your vendetta against so-called "terrorists"...you understand as well as we do that the CIA has always labeled and unlabeled "terrorists" however it pleases, so we have no qualms about that...but for heaven's sake, don't you realize how big a fool you're making of me? Gimme a f***ing break for Chrissake! I'm not asking for Bashar's head on a platter anymore, but you gotta take him down at least a peg or two or you're making my office a joke!
John K: (Mm-hmm...mm-hmm...)
Vladimir: Whoa, whoa there, Barack my bro! Don't get so riled up! I told you almost two months ago we'd be having this discussion before long...yet you didn't take my advice to fire your whole CIA section advising on Syrian policy - and here I am amusing myself as to how they've trashed your whole administration in the sh*tter! I'm your best friend now - don't you ever doubt that!
Let me refresh your memory a bit, since you've had too much time on the golf course over the summer to digest how your utterly clueless spooks flushed you down the toilet...
I had a deal with my old pal Recep in Ankara way back in early July, as soon as our coalition totally surrounded Aleppo for the first time, that we were willing to cut the Turks 90 percent of the slack they wanted with the Kurds in northern Syria, as long as they were okay with the secular revolutionary opposition joining a transitional government with Mr. Assad still its figurehead...the Turks were really happy with this arrangement, and it allowed us to propose to both them and yourself that it was time to finally join forces against the real terrorists - you know, those goons who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans 15 years ago?
But conveniently, no sooner had we struck a tentative alliance with the Pentagon against Al Nusra than we noticed something strange but familiar: the jihadists started shuffling positions, equipment, and even uniforms all over Idlib and Aleppo provinces, in such a deliberate and blatant attempt to obscure who was who that your CIA and DOD could reasonably complain they couldn't agree with us just who was a Nusra-linked terrorist and who was a "moderate." Sorry bro, but they didn't fool us: we knew then and there that your Langley boys were trying to snooker us bigtime...we didn't bite...but your spooks did at least buy a crucial window for the terrorists to mingle enough with the approved "moderates" that we simply couldn't hit many of them for long enough that they could assemble a massive counterattack to break our siege of Aleppo.
In the meantime, though, some of your crazier deep-state operatives instigated that embarrassing putsch against Recep...they knew their new strategy of deception would ultimately rely on a more pliant Turkey which wouldn't cooperate with us...they failed miserably - we knew from the get-go that Recep was in danger from the CIA as soon as he publicly began to turn towards us and the Syrian regime, so we tipped him off just as your CIA plants were finalizing preparations for their strike. But I doubt you and Recep chatted about that here in Hangzhou...you were too busy pleading with him to release those July 15 traitors before they spill out more beans about Langley's miserably failed dirty insurrection - which of course we have every interest of keeping secret once our Turkish intelligence partners pass them on to us.
I must say - your CIA has done such an excellent job for us that it's become a running joke in the Kremlin and FSB that we'll one day erect a plaque for it to commemorate how it handed Syria and the Levant to Russia on a gold platter! You see, only because of the CIA has old Recep now wrought just the havoc with the Kurds in northern Syria that we agreed to let him indulge in - with your own support! Nothing like a bitch you have to keep happy because you can't lose her, is there?
So there you have it...good ole CIA couldn't keep its sticky fingers out of sovereign national interests...had to keep the 70-year gravy train going in spite of all common sense...tsk, tsk!
Anyway, as you know now, later this month I'm going to host both Erdogan and Assad at the Kremlin, if they'll both but be reasonable and sane...and perhaps we'll finally get this bloody freakin' war on a sensible path to conclusion...I'm not counting on it though...not only is your imperial intelligence and defense bureaucracy thirsty for revenge, but I've pretty much given up hope that you'll finally stand up to that sorry bunch of clowns.
But hey, just between you and I, Barack...absolutely no hard feelings! None! Like I said, I'm your best friend! I still absolutely need your help and even your initiative...no Syrian peace will be legitimate without American approval and even sponsorship...I need your credibility to be preserved so I can leverage it for my own efforts! (Smiling sarcastically) Please, between you and I...let's put a happy face on this whole situation!
And I apologize in advance: if Bashar's men and the Iranians still have their act together, that siege of Aleppo which they've tenatively reestablished might actually last and lead to surrender this time...it won't look good for you, but remember these things I've told you to both remind and educate you...if you forget again from too much golf in a few weeks, I'll be glad to rehash this lesson - updated of course - over the phone with you.
Barack: Okay thanks Vlad...you know I probably got only 50 to 70 percent of what you shared, tentatively at that...but thanks for cutting me some slack when I need it most. We're no closer to substantive agreement on policy, but yet again we've avoided the worst. I can't say I trust you yet, but all you've told me has opened my eyes to your fine grasp of the intricacies of this crisis in Syria which is needed for its eventual resolution. I see you understand and empathize that I don't want to leave the bigs in January with this fire still burning...I look forward to more of your interesting insight as to how to put it out...and in the meantime, I'm more clear than ever that what we're ultimately dealing with here is a fundamental lack of trust between us, between our nations and cultures...you could well be right on many things with regards to Syria and specifically Mr. Assad...but I take it you understand why I must stress I can't yet trust that your judgment isn't merely politically pragmatic, but ethically right too - and that's what I've always firmly believed to be the only true pragmatism.
Vladimir: You're most graciously welcome...we can eventually overcome our trust gap...let's begin by acknowledging it more honestly and openly, yet seeing that we're still not remotely enemies...it never hurts to cling to what we both know to be true without equivocation...oh, and good luck with everything in your final months.
Barack: Look at you, you pathetic little Russkie twerp...remember I can kick your a** on the basketball court if this really has to get nasty...let me remind you that I'm still the president of the world's only superpower...don't think for a moment that your pint-sized gas station posing as a proper G20 economy (now that I've kicked you out of the G8) can actually challenge our dominance of Europe or the Middle East, let alone both! For the last time - tell Assad he has to get his own and his entire extended family's behinds the hell out of Syria, or there will be consequences!
Vladimir: Er, are you feeling okay, dear Barack? We're here to try to meet in the middle on restarting the peace process, remember? We don't need threats now, do we?
Barack: Okay, let's cut the bullcr*p, Vlad. We had a deal that you were going to pause that son-of-a-bitch eye doctor's barrel bombing of women and children in Aleppo and elsewhere first...and only then can we plausibly work together again on the negotiations between our minions that last flopped a little while back...we've bent over backwards to concede to your blackmail on joining your vendetta against so-called "terrorists"...you understand as well as we do that the CIA has always labeled and unlabeled "terrorists" however it pleases, so we have no qualms about that...but for heaven's sake, don't you realize how big a fool you're making of me? Gimme a f***ing break for Chrissake! I'm not asking for Bashar's head on a platter anymore, but you gotta take him down at least a peg or two or you're making my office a joke!
John K: (Mm-hmm...mm-hmm...)
Vladimir: Whoa, whoa there, Barack my bro! Don't get so riled up! I told you almost two months ago we'd be having this discussion before long...yet you didn't take my advice to fire your whole CIA section advising on Syrian policy - and here I am amusing myself as to how they've trashed your whole administration in the sh*tter! I'm your best friend now - don't you ever doubt that!
Let me refresh your memory a bit, since you've had too much time on the golf course over the summer to digest how your utterly clueless spooks flushed you down the toilet...
I had a deal with my old pal Recep in Ankara way back in early July, as soon as our coalition totally surrounded Aleppo for the first time, that we were willing to cut the Turks 90 percent of the slack they wanted with the Kurds in northern Syria, as long as they were okay with the secular revolutionary opposition joining a transitional government with Mr. Assad still its figurehead...the Turks were really happy with this arrangement, and it allowed us to propose to both them and yourself that it was time to finally join forces against the real terrorists - you know, those goons who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans 15 years ago?
But conveniently, no sooner had we struck a tentative alliance with the Pentagon against Al Nusra than we noticed something strange but familiar: the jihadists started shuffling positions, equipment, and even uniforms all over Idlib and Aleppo provinces, in such a deliberate and blatant attempt to obscure who was who that your CIA and DOD could reasonably complain they couldn't agree with us just who was a Nusra-linked terrorist and who was a "moderate." Sorry bro, but they didn't fool us: we knew then and there that your Langley boys were trying to snooker us bigtime...we didn't bite...but your spooks did at least buy a crucial window for the terrorists to mingle enough with the approved "moderates" that we simply couldn't hit many of them for long enough that they could assemble a massive counterattack to break our siege of Aleppo.
In the meantime, though, some of your crazier deep-state operatives instigated that embarrassing putsch against Recep...they knew their new strategy of deception would ultimately rely on a more pliant Turkey which wouldn't cooperate with us...they failed miserably - we knew from the get-go that Recep was in danger from the CIA as soon as he publicly began to turn towards us and the Syrian regime, so we tipped him off just as your CIA plants were finalizing preparations for their strike. But I doubt you and Recep chatted about that here in Hangzhou...you were too busy pleading with him to release those July 15 traitors before they spill out more beans about Langley's miserably failed dirty insurrection - which of course we have every interest of keeping secret once our Turkish intelligence partners pass them on to us.
I must say - your CIA has done such an excellent job for us that it's become a running joke in the Kremlin and FSB that we'll one day erect a plaque for it to commemorate how it handed Syria and the Levant to Russia on a gold platter! You see, only because of the CIA has old Recep now wrought just the havoc with the Kurds in northern Syria that we agreed to let him indulge in - with your own support! Nothing like a bitch you have to keep happy because you can't lose her, is there?
So there you have it...good ole CIA couldn't keep its sticky fingers out of sovereign national interests...had to keep the 70-year gravy train going in spite of all common sense...tsk, tsk!
Anyway, as you know now, later this month I'm going to host both Erdogan and Assad at the Kremlin, if they'll both but be reasonable and sane...and perhaps we'll finally get this bloody freakin' war on a sensible path to conclusion...I'm not counting on it though...not only is your imperial intelligence and defense bureaucracy thirsty for revenge, but I've pretty much given up hope that you'll finally stand up to that sorry bunch of clowns.
But hey, just between you and I, Barack...absolutely no hard feelings! None! Like I said, I'm your best friend! I still absolutely need your help and even your initiative...no Syrian peace will be legitimate without American approval and even sponsorship...I need your credibility to be preserved so I can leverage it for my own efforts! (Smiling sarcastically) Please, between you and I...let's put a happy face on this whole situation!
And I apologize in advance: if Bashar's men and the Iranians still have their act together, that siege of Aleppo which they've tenatively reestablished might actually last and lead to surrender this time...it won't look good for you, but remember these things I've told you to both remind and educate you...if you forget again from too much golf in a few weeks, I'll be glad to rehash this lesson - updated of course - over the phone with you.
Barack: Okay thanks Vlad...you know I probably got only 50 to 70 percent of what you shared, tentatively at that...but thanks for cutting me some slack when I need it most. We're no closer to substantive agreement on policy, but yet again we've avoided the worst. I can't say I trust you yet, but all you've told me has opened my eyes to your fine grasp of the intricacies of this crisis in Syria which is needed for its eventual resolution. I see you understand and empathize that I don't want to leave the bigs in January with this fire still burning...I look forward to more of your interesting insight as to how to put it out...and in the meantime, I'm more clear than ever that what we're ultimately dealing with here is a fundamental lack of trust between us, between our nations and cultures...you could well be right on many things with regards to Syria and specifically Mr. Assad...but I take it you understand why I must stress I can't yet trust that your judgment isn't merely politically pragmatic, but ethically right too - and that's what I've always firmly believed to be the only true pragmatism.
Vladimir: You're most graciously welcome...we can eventually overcome our trust gap...let's begin by acknowledging it more honestly and openly, yet seeing that we're still not remotely enemies...it never hurts to cling to what we both know to be true without equivocation...oh, and good luck with everything in your final months.
Friday, September 2, 2016
Path to peace in Syria finally emerging - through partition
In the week and a half since Turkey's intervention in northern Syria, more evidence of a secret Putin-Erdogan accord to eventually draw down the five-year-old conflict into a mutually acceptable stalemate has steadily emerged. While the specifics must play out over a period of weeks or even months, the general contours of such a deal are already becoming clear. The path to peace in Syria is finally emerging - through a de facto partition of the country into no less than three statelets (regime, rebel, and Kurd, with ISIS a fourth wild card).
Assad will be allowed to survive - no question about that anymore. By "survive" it means he will be allowed to keep Damascus and other major urban centers in the west of the country, not yet including Aleppo in the far north, since that contested metropolis will continue to be the focal point of the diplomatic jockeying over the shattered country by the intervening powers. The city has effectively fallen back under regime siege in recent days aback intense airstrikes.
In the past week, starting with the key Damascus suburb of Daraya, a string of additional urban rebel holdouts along the country's main Damascus-Homs corridor have capitulated to the regime's starvation sieges: as before, the insurgent fighters and their families who wish to fight on are relocating to rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest. The total population being transferred seems to be in excess of 100,000 - a very significant portion of the hostile resistance that hasn't yet given up in core regime areas.
Damascus and Homs are now close to being fully and irrevocably secured, with even their long-restive outskirts and satellite towns cleared of rebels. The speed and suddenness with which these regime consolidations are taking place indicates Turkey's new concession of Assad's role in a political transition process. Since they were already on the verge of liquidation, these residual pockets were abandoned for good by Ankara, which two weeks ago finally buckled on its uncompromising stance that Assad must resign immediately.
In lieu of toppling the Baath regime on its home turf, Turkey is now stuffing many of its remaining eggs in the basket of solidifying the Sunni jihadistan of Idlib province: it apparently secured the unusual concession from Assad of allowing the deported fighters to retain their weapons, which will no doubt reinforce the militant ranks in their new positions in Idlib or on the still-raging front lines around Aleppo, further north and east.
So both the regime and the rebels are transferring military assets to the northwestern theater to double down on their contest for territory in Aleppo province, with Aleppo city itself still the central prize. To relieve intensifying regime pressure on the slim lifeline into insurgent-held eastern Aleppo, a new large formation of rebels and jihadists yesterday launched an offensive to cut off the vulnerable government supply road leading up to Aleppo from Hama, prompting a regime counteroffensive as well.
At this stage in the game, the key question is what degree of regional strategic capital Erdogan is willing to expend to prevent the fall of Aleppo to Assad. Turkish influence in any future Syrian polity now depends in large part on how strong a position its proxies in the northwest are able to consolidate vis-à-vis the Damascus regime; ideally, if Aleppo can be held, Ankara will wield a veto over the Baath regime it still detests because it will enjoy the political front of the surviving secular revolutionary opposition hanging on in the eastern districts.
More realistically, though, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have every intention to expel the rebel holdouts from eastern Aleppo just as they have successfully surrendered-or-starved other pockets of resistance to date - even though this effort will be an order of magnitude greater.
To do so, they must firmly secure the sole supply route from Hama up to Aleppo, which is now threatened by the rebel-jihadist counterthrusts from Idlib province southwards into Hama province. Even with this attack contained or thwarted, precious manpower and resources will have been diverted from elsewhere by the regime to secure this sector, leaving less available to reestablish the siege ring around Aleppo.
Nonetheless, Aleppo's re-encirclement and eventual fall to a surrender-or-starve siege may be just a matter of time - if Erdogan would but be realistic about what the low-hanging and attainable fruit for Turkey really are at this point in Syria. He knows beyond any shred of doubt that it's the Sunni jihadists, not the secular revolutionaries, who are key to the opposition's leverage against Damascus; he also realizes that should the Axis of Fatima really feel endangered in its goal of ultimately strangling eastern Aleppo, Tehran will simply consent to base Russian heavy bombers on its territory again, so they can quickly finish the job of depopulating the rebel sector of all noncombatants, thereby leaving nothing left for the jihadists to "liberate." So, for the very limited actual benefit of nominal secular leadership of the opposition's transition team in talks with Assad (itself already probably little more than a wishful sham), no way would Erdogan want to pour out the blood and guts of his most valuable Syrian proxies. Sure, Assad and the Iranians must pay dearly for their final victory at Aleppo, and that's why Al Nusra and its allies in the Army of Conquest who together punctured the government's initial siege in July, and indeed the beleaguered rebels in Aleppo itself, must fight on until defeat is finally truly inevitable; but Ankara has done the proper calculations and when it comes down to it, won't go for broke on account of what will end up being little more than a symbolic pile of rubble that could soon turn into a mass graveyard for the cream of its surrogate army (courtesy of becoming a training and target practice ground for the Russian and Syrian air forces).
Rather, Turkey's hopes in Syria - indeed, the regional Sunni powers' collective hopes - now rest on locking down the statelet of Idlib province and possibly opening another "moderate rebel" statelet along the border strip previously held by ISIS. If Kurdish sources are to be believed, the second part should be a piece of cake: already the Turkish operation around Jarabulus has cleared ISIS out from a 400-square mile zone with minimal losses as the latter appears to have largely withdrawn without a fight.
Ideally, eventually the Turkish-backed rebels can shove aside both ISIS and the Kurds in Aleppo province and link up a corridor with the Idlib statelet north of the city - which along with its environs will likely have fallen to the regime by then.
At that point, all four statelets will be relatively set and each will have been largely secured with a core of extremely difficult-to-conquer loyalist sectors. The Assad regime will have "won" its war by settling for the limited objective of securing the main cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Latakia, the bulk of their surrounding governorates, and the main interconnecting roads and supply routes; it will have retained complete control of the Mediterranean coastline. The Kurds meanwhile will be all but untouchable in their distant "Rojava" federation in the north and northeastern highlands along the southeastern Turkish frontier, with a good slice of the eastern desert to boot. The rebel-jihadist, Al Nusra-led alliance - effectively the Saudi-Gulf-Turkish protectorate in Syria - will have a Sunni Sharia-run mini-state with Idlib its capital but also much territory in Aleppo province (though not the city and its immediate surroundings) and a small but strategically significant piece of Hama province as well. And finally, though severely truncated by the Kurds and Al Nusra-led rebels (as opposed to symbolically pinpricked by the regime), ISIS will still have most of the Syrian flank of its dwindling caliphate.
Interestingly, despite being considerably weaker than any of the other three mini-states and almost certain to have no place in peace negotiations that would involve those three, ISIS could still be a key strategic factor in what will have devolved into the final dismemberment of Syria into multiple sovereign entities in all but name. ISIS may yet survive if for no reason other than that the regime, the rebels, and the Kurds alike are each loath to give the other two a cheap strategic boost by bearing the cost of eliminating it. By the same token, however, ISIS may also reap the benefits of having three, not two (let alone just one) stronger enemies whose official policies will still invariably be its complete destruction, especially since the international community is likely to maintain far beyond its actual credibility an official fiction that Syria hasn't in fact permanently disintegrated - and concomitantly the half-truth that ISIS is the one common enemy of all legitimate Syrians.
So even ISIS, whose true degree of genuine suicidal spirit we'll eventually find out, might actually have a role in Syria's peace after all - that is, a peace through partition. Some might even argue that we've already been inexorably heading that way for a while.
Assad will be allowed to survive - no question about that anymore. By "survive" it means he will be allowed to keep Damascus and other major urban centers in the west of the country, not yet including Aleppo in the far north, since that contested metropolis will continue to be the focal point of the diplomatic jockeying over the shattered country by the intervening powers. The city has effectively fallen back under regime siege in recent days aback intense airstrikes.
In the past week, starting with the key Damascus suburb of Daraya, a string of additional urban rebel holdouts along the country's main Damascus-Homs corridor have capitulated to the regime's starvation sieges: as before, the insurgent fighters and their families who wish to fight on are relocating to rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest. The total population being transferred seems to be in excess of 100,000 - a very significant portion of the hostile resistance that hasn't yet given up in core regime areas.
Damascus and Homs are now close to being fully and irrevocably secured, with even their long-restive outskirts and satellite towns cleared of rebels. The speed and suddenness with which these regime consolidations are taking place indicates Turkey's new concession of Assad's role in a political transition process. Since they were already on the verge of liquidation, these residual pockets were abandoned for good by Ankara, which two weeks ago finally buckled on its uncompromising stance that Assad must resign immediately.
In lieu of toppling the Baath regime on its home turf, Turkey is now stuffing many of its remaining eggs in the basket of solidifying the Sunni jihadistan of Idlib province: it apparently secured the unusual concession from Assad of allowing the deported fighters to retain their weapons, which will no doubt reinforce the militant ranks in their new positions in Idlib or on the still-raging front lines around Aleppo, further north and east.
So both the regime and the rebels are transferring military assets to the northwestern theater to double down on their contest for territory in Aleppo province, with Aleppo city itself still the central prize. To relieve intensifying regime pressure on the slim lifeline into insurgent-held eastern Aleppo, a new large formation of rebels and jihadists yesterday launched an offensive to cut off the vulnerable government supply road leading up to Aleppo from Hama, prompting a regime counteroffensive as well.
At this stage in the game, the key question is what degree of regional strategic capital Erdogan is willing to expend to prevent the fall of Aleppo to Assad. Turkish influence in any future Syrian polity now depends in large part on how strong a position its proxies in the northwest are able to consolidate vis-à-vis the Damascus regime; ideally, if Aleppo can be held, Ankara will wield a veto over the Baath regime it still detests because it will enjoy the political front of the surviving secular revolutionary opposition hanging on in the eastern districts.
More realistically, though, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have every intention to expel the rebel holdouts from eastern Aleppo just as they have successfully surrendered-or-starved other pockets of resistance to date - even though this effort will be an order of magnitude greater.
To do so, they must firmly secure the sole supply route from Hama up to Aleppo, which is now threatened by the rebel-jihadist counterthrusts from Idlib province southwards into Hama province. Even with this attack contained or thwarted, precious manpower and resources will have been diverted from elsewhere by the regime to secure this sector, leaving less available to reestablish the siege ring around Aleppo.
Nonetheless, Aleppo's re-encirclement and eventual fall to a surrender-or-starve siege may be just a matter of time - if Erdogan would but be realistic about what the low-hanging and attainable fruit for Turkey really are at this point in Syria. He knows beyond any shred of doubt that it's the Sunni jihadists, not the secular revolutionaries, who are key to the opposition's leverage against Damascus; he also realizes that should the Axis of Fatima really feel endangered in its goal of ultimately strangling eastern Aleppo, Tehran will simply consent to base Russian heavy bombers on its territory again, so they can quickly finish the job of depopulating the rebel sector of all noncombatants, thereby leaving nothing left for the jihadists to "liberate." So, for the very limited actual benefit of nominal secular leadership of the opposition's transition team in talks with Assad (itself already probably little more than a wishful sham), no way would Erdogan want to pour out the blood and guts of his most valuable Syrian proxies. Sure, Assad and the Iranians must pay dearly for their final victory at Aleppo, and that's why Al Nusra and its allies in the Army of Conquest who together punctured the government's initial siege in July, and indeed the beleaguered rebels in Aleppo itself, must fight on until defeat is finally truly inevitable; but Ankara has done the proper calculations and when it comes down to it, won't go for broke on account of what will end up being little more than a symbolic pile of rubble that could soon turn into a mass graveyard for the cream of its surrogate army (courtesy of becoming a training and target practice ground for the Russian and Syrian air forces).
Rather, Turkey's hopes in Syria - indeed, the regional Sunni powers' collective hopes - now rest on locking down the statelet of Idlib province and possibly opening another "moderate rebel" statelet along the border strip previously held by ISIS. If Kurdish sources are to be believed, the second part should be a piece of cake: already the Turkish operation around Jarabulus has cleared ISIS out from a 400-square mile zone with minimal losses as the latter appears to have largely withdrawn without a fight.
Ideally, eventually the Turkish-backed rebels can shove aside both ISIS and the Kurds in Aleppo province and link up a corridor with the Idlib statelet north of the city - which along with its environs will likely have fallen to the regime by then.
At that point, all four statelets will be relatively set and each will have been largely secured with a core of extremely difficult-to-conquer loyalist sectors. The Assad regime will have "won" its war by settling for the limited objective of securing the main cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Latakia, the bulk of their surrounding governorates, and the main interconnecting roads and supply routes; it will have retained complete control of the Mediterranean coastline. The Kurds meanwhile will be all but untouchable in their distant "Rojava" federation in the north and northeastern highlands along the southeastern Turkish frontier, with a good slice of the eastern desert to boot. The rebel-jihadist, Al Nusra-led alliance - effectively the Saudi-Gulf-Turkish protectorate in Syria - will have a Sunni Sharia-run mini-state with Idlib its capital but also much territory in Aleppo province (though not the city and its immediate surroundings) and a small but strategically significant piece of Hama province as well. And finally, though severely truncated by the Kurds and Al Nusra-led rebels (as opposed to symbolically pinpricked by the regime), ISIS will still have most of the Syrian flank of its dwindling caliphate.
Interestingly, despite being considerably weaker than any of the other three mini-states and almost certain to have no place in peace negotiations that would involve those three, ISIS could still be a key strategic factor in what will have devolved into the final dismemberment of Syria into multiple sovereign entities in all but name. ISIS may yet survive if for no reason other than that the regime, the rebels, and the Kurds alike are each loath to give the other two a cheap strategic boost by bearing the cost of eliminating it. By the same token, however, ISIS may also reap the benefits of having three, not two (let alone just one) stronger enemies whose official policies will still invariably be its complete destruction, especially since the international community is likely to maintain far beyond its actual credibility an official fiction that Syria hasn't in fact permanently disintegrated - and concomitantly the half-truth that ISIS is the one common enemy of all legitimate Syrians.
So even ISIS, whose true degree of genuine suicidal spirit we'll eventually find out, might actually have a role in Syria's peace after all - that is, a peace through partition. Some might even argue that we've already been inexorably heading that way for a while.
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