On the anniversary of Russia's entry into the Syrian civil war, and little more than half a year since Moscow announced the end of its initial mission, it appears increasingly likely that this whole operation in the shattered country is actually just beginning.
With additional Russian warplanes heading back to Syria, it probably won't be long before the previous peak of Russian aerial bombardment over the course of the last year is reached or even exceeded.
The key difference now is that the political process to end the war is all but dead in the wake of the collapse of ceasefire talks with the US, leaving the Kremlin with no choice but military re-escalation. Contrary to the popular Western narrative, Vladimir Putin intervened in Syria out of perceived vital interest, not some vain desire to reassert Russian power or make up for the supposed Russian quagmire in Ukraine. And it is out of this same vital interest - preventing the fall of the Syrian regime to an insurgency increasingly dominated by radical jihadists - that he will now double down for a longer fight.
The West has never understood or appreciated the Russian view that even if a so-called "moderate opposition" takes center stage in a new Syrian government after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, it will very likely be muscled out within months by extremists with whom it was joined in a marriage of convenience so long as both still had a common foe in Damascus. Moscow entered the conflict with few illusions about what had to be done: these "moderates" had to be brought to heel first, so as to be forced into a choice between reconciliation with the regime and a continued devil's bargain with their jihadist bedfellows.
If there's any miscalculation Putin has made, it has been to underestimate the extent to which the whole Syrian crisis had long since become a strategic red line for Saudi Arabia in its deteriorating proxy war with Iran. To the former, any settlement short of Assad's removal was and still is considered a major blow to the millennial Sunni Arab supremacy over Shi'ism in the heart of the Islamic world. As such, Riyadh has taken great care to steer the exiled Syrian opposition in the direction of a blatantly sectarian goal of Sunni Arab majoritarianism in a post-Assad government, with few if any explicit concessions to minority rights in one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse pieces of real estate in the region.
Had the Syrian peace process been driven primarily by feuding Syrians, it would have been a rather simple affair for Russia to mediate: in exchange for the regime's granting of full amnesty for rebels and dissidents and some limited posts in government (including more federalized local administrations) for their leaders, the insurgency would turn its guns away from Damascus and towards Al Nusra Front and especially ISIS.
But the Saudis would have none of this. Knowing full well that those rebel groups with the most leverage over Damascus and Moscow were the very ones it supported most fervently in an uncompromising stance against Assad, Riyadh corralled the Syrian nationalists into its maximalist straitjacket, such that by the time the opposition entered the Geneva peace process last winter, it was effectively little more than a front for the Gulf kingdom's regional agenda.
Clearly the Saudis wanted to keep the pressure on Assad at a very high level and retain a sense of escalation capacity; their new crown prince, the hotheaded young Muhammad bin Salman, was keen on acquiring the credentials of a tough military leader capable of duking it out with Iran (especially in Yemen) increasingly independently of the US. He seems to have pushed his father, the more circumspect King Salman himself, into an overall more hawkish stance vis-à-vis the Russo-Iranian axis than would have been advisable; his confidence, however, was apparently founded on an outdated perception of the depth of American involvement in the region generally and the resolve of the Obama administration to enforce the Iran nuclear deal specifically.
It has finally gradually emerged over the course of 2016 - in the wake of the final cutoff of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in January - just how much of US-Saudi policy since mid-2015 has been predicated on a false assessment of leverage over Tehran with regards to sanctions over the Islamic republic's nuclear weapons program. When the nuclear deal was secured with Russian brokership at the UN in July 2015 - at virtually the same time that Iran was coordinating with Moscow's planned foray into Syria - it was widely thought in Washington that Tehran's desire for renewed access to international markets and investment would outweigh its interest in Assad's survival in Syria (a point on which even Ayatollah Khamenei was expected to be flexible if it came to it).
This has turned out to be the central blunder of the Obama administration - one that it seems to have tried to hide or downplay with its own media and its Mideast allies alike, but which has become increasingly hard to do so.
As Saudi-Iranian relations nosedived over the execution of Saudi Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr around new year's, an enraged Tehran saw fit to test the limits of US resolve to ward off the creeping Russo-Iranian usurpation of the longstanding American-Saudi "power couple" status in the region. The campaign to prop up Assad noticeably intensified and scored key successes against the rebels in the following weeks, culminating in the first US-Russian ceasefire agreement of late February; in the meantime the Iranians brazenly stepped up their provocations against US naval personnel and vessels in the Gulf, kidnapping a group of American sailors who were then released in negotiations that involved a secret reimbursement of $400 million of previously frozen Iranian funds.
Since then, through two failed Syrian ceasefires, the Russo-Iranian position has gradually but undeniably further improved at the expense of the American-Saudi one, both in the Levant and more broadly across western Eurasia as a whole. The tectonic paradigm shift is not military or political but socioeconomic: as Europe grapples with the double whammy of a creaky financial system and an unassimilable mass of Muslim refugees fueling a nativist-populist backlash, a resilient Russia's expanding commercial ties with upstart giants China and India make it far less isolated than Western sanctions purport to make it; Moscow has matched Saudi-led OPEC tit-for-tat in the production and market-share battle, notably stealing critical Chinese business from Riyadh since 2014. Iran, too, is increasingly in cahoots with Delhi and Beijing as well as Moscow: the great Eurasian powers are collectively becoming so self-sufficient in their economic and geopolitical heft that it's actually the stagnant and confused West which is beginning to look isolated.
This has enormous implications for Saudi Arabia and its junior Gulf Sunni monarchies: their principal livelihood having been decimated by none other than their great ally and protector (the shale-fracking revolution in the US), whose public has turned increasingly hostile (the US Congress' overriding of Obama's veto of JASTA against the Saudi government), they could soon feel hung out to dry by Washington so badly that they'll have to reconsider the entire basis of their foreign and security policy.
All this means that the Russian operation in Syria, now ramping up once more after a brief halt in March, has far more potential sustainability than the West and especially the US assumes to be the case. The combination of Russian and Iranian austerity and zeal in the face of American fecklessness, halfheartedness, and confusion on top of Saudi exposure and vulnerability in a chronically cheap-oil environment marked by dramatically elevated Western Islamophobia - to say nothing of the badly frayed US-Turkish relationship in the wake of the failed July putsch against president Recep Tayyip Erdogan - points to an irreversible decline of the regional power structure which has enthroned Washington atop the Middle East for four decades. Perhaps the bigger question already is how badly these developments will harm US influence further afield, in both Europe and further eastern Asia.
Russia for its part (and Putin specifically) has little cause for sudden dramatic escalation of any considerable magnitude; its airpower and other support of the Syrian regime's war effort (to include a ground presence of advisers and limited deployment of combat personnel) has the wherewithal to be incrementally upgraded and augmented in such a way that the political and diplomatic aspects of an intensifying "great game" between regional and global powers - founded ultimately upon socioeconomic factors across vast lands and habitats - will predetermine and undergird the actual military strokes and strikes (and counterstrokes and counterstrikes).
In that regard, it's probably little wonder that Obama and Kerry have been reduced to the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off when it comes to the Syrian problem: having long ago been dealt bad cards in the poker match, at long last their bluffs are being called by their opposing numbers who are ever more confident of holding the winning hands.
Friday, September 30, 2016
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
As Syrian revolution finally dies, fate of Islam is what matters now
The Syrian army has launched a ground offensive to retake Aleppo, in what could be a major turning point in the civil war. Pro-regime media outlets have already trumpeted the retaking of a key district in the central "old town" sector of the city, though the sustainability of this gain will only be confirmed in the coming day or two. Although the regime and its Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies are eager to occupy rebel territory, it also suits the Axis of Fatima to draw the Sunni insurgents out into the open in bold counterattacks that expose them to withering air power.
The longer this continues, the more Moscow corners Washington into caving into its demands for a combined front against the terrorist groups ISIS and Al Nusra Front as a precondition for any letup in the brutal attrition of rebel-held Aleppo's remaining civilian population.
With reports leaking out that the deep-pocketed Gulf Sunni monarchies may arm the rebels with advanced anti-aircraft weapons, now is definitely the time to press home the advantage of virtually unchallenged air power.
In fact, the Syrian air force's higher rate of jet losses since spring already indicates the presence of effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles throughout rebel-held territory, so it's questionable just how much more of a difference the stepped-up aid being proposed will make. The regime's aerial warfare tactics have doubtless constantly shifted and adjusted in the face of the growing SAM threat.
A bigger stretch is whether anything at all can be done to significantly dent Russian air dominance: not only do the Russian jets include advanced models like the Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35, but even their older Su-24s and Su-25s doubtless employ more sophisticated countermeasures against anti-aircraft threats. It's also likely that should push come to shove, the Kremlin will unleash its long-range heavy bombers like the Tupolev Tu-22M3 to drop larger numbers of massive "bunker busters" (possibly from Iranian airbases again) that have wreaked such havoc on underground civilian shelters and subterranean rebel installations in Aleppo in recent days; these high-flying supersonic beasts need something more substantial than man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to seriously target.
Only a massive jihadist counteroffensive can now save Aleppo from falling back into Assad's clutches and thereby effectively reducing the Syrian opposition to a predominantly rural insurgency with a glaring preponderance of radical Islamists. Absent such a dramatic turn of events yet again, in a month or so pro-regime forces will have neutralized Aleppo without necessarily occupying most of the rebel eastern sector - they simply need to constrict all potential pathways leading in and out of those areas (for both people and supplies) so tightly that it won't be plausible anymore for the rebel-jihadist alliance to ever recover from the encirclement.
At that point, Damascus and Moscow will have a powerful bargaining chip: they can demand that any remaining "moderate" opposition join a proposed national unity government if they still desire to salvage anything at all from their long and ultimately failed struggle for Western-style democracy. The only alternative would be to be ground down slowly and painfully over a further period of months as a pocket once containing close to half a million inhabitants is drained down to potentially less than 100,000 (from 250,000-300,000 currently) - while being surrounded by increasingly diehard resistance that can only be characterized by deepening radical Islamicization, anyway.
But in fact, even the best-case scenario of a new rebel-jihadist breach of the reimposed siege probably wouldn't be much more auspicious for whatever's left of the original Syrian spring. Such a victory will be the product of such a brutal pitched battle that it can only further solidify the jihadist extremist element of the resistance as the heart and soul of the whole cause. In that case, Messrs. Assad and Putin might even cynically allow the ruins of eastern Aleppo to become the premier magnet for Sunni terrorist and militant groups in the whole region, so as to dig in for the binary struggle between secular dictatorship and reactionary theocracy that they've always claimed the West must make; it would help Ayatollah Khamenei, as well, for Aleppo to serve the same purpose for Iran's new "Shia liberation army" drafted from the entire region that a bombed-out Beirut played for Lebanese Hezbollah (and its Iranian sponsors) three decades ago.
For the Axis of Fatima, crushing the Sunni extremists and terrorists would be really nice; but swaying the rest of the world that they're on the frontlines of blocking a global descent into medieval barbarism would be even better. The future looks sunny either way: between themselves and their most ferocious enemies, they have all but strangled the Syrian revolution stillborn and, with it, snuffed out the dying breath of the vaunted Arab spring. That great political wind which seemed to blow so hopefully in the liberal West's direction has at last settled on a new course of a colossal struggle for the fate of Islam in the third millennium.
The longer this continues, the more Moscow corners Washington into caving into its demands for a combined front against the terrorist groups ISIS and Al Nusra Front as a precondition for any letup in the brutal attrition of rebel-held Aleppo's remaining civilian population.
With reports leaking out that the deep-pocketed Gulf Sunni monarchies may arm the rebels with advanced anti-aircraft weapons, now is definitely the time to press home the advantage of virtually unchallenged air power.
In fact, the Syrian air force's higher rate of jet losses since spring already indicates the presence of effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles throughout rebel-held territory, so it's questionable just how much more of a difference the stepped-up aid being proposed will make. The regime's aerial warfare tactics have doubtless constantly shifted and adjusted in the face of the growing SAM threat.
A bigger stretch is whether anything at all can be done to significantly dent Russian air dominance: not only do the Russian jets include advanced models like the Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35, but even their older Su-24s and Su-25s doubtless employ more sophisticated countermeasures against anti-aircraft threats. It's also likely that should push come to shove, the Kremlin will unleash its long-range heavy bombers like the Tupolev Tu-22M3 to drop larger numbers of massive "bunker busters" (possibly from Iranian airbases again) that have wreaked such havoc on underground civilian shelters and subterranean rebel installations in Aleppo in recent days; these high-flying supersonic beasts need something more substantial than man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to seriously target.
Only a massive jihadist counteroffensive can now save Aleppo from falling back into Assad's clutches and thereby effectively reducing the Syrian opposition to a predominantly rural insurgency with a glaring preponderance of radical Islamists. Absent such a dramatic turn of events yet again, in a month or so pro-regime forces will have neutralized Aleppo without necessarily occupying most of the rebel eastern sector - they simply need to constrict all potential pathways leading in and out of those areas (for both people and supplies) so tightly that it won't be plausible anymore for the rebel-jihadist alliance to ever recover from the encirclement.
At that point, Damascus and Moscow will have a powerful bargaining chip: they can demand that any remaining "moderate" opposition join a proposed national unity government if they still desire to salvage anything at all from their long and ultimately failed struggle for Western-style democracy. The only alternative would be to be ground down slowly and painfully over a further period of months as a pocket once containing close to half a million inhabitants is drained down to potentially less than 100,000 (from 250,000-300,000 currently) - while being surrounded by increasingly diehard resistance that can only be characterized by deepening radical Islamicization, anyway.
But in fact, even the best-case scenario of a new rebel-jihadist breach of the reimposed siege probably wouldn't be much more auspicious for whatever's left of the original Syrian spring. Such a victory will be the product of such a brutal pitched battle that it can only further solidify the jihadist extremist element of the resistance as the heart and soul of the whole cause. In that case, Messrs. Assad and Putin might even cynically allow the ruins of eastern Aleppo to become the premier magnet for Sunni terrorist and militant groups in the whole region, so as to dig in for the binary struggle between secular dictatorship and reactionary theocracy that they've always claimed the West must make; it would help Ayatollah Khamenei, as well, for Aleppo to serve the same purpose for Iran's new "Shia liberation army" drafted from the entire region that a bombed-out Beirut played for Lebanese Hezbollah (and its Iranian sponsors) three decades ago.
For the Axis of Fatima, crushing the Sunni extremists and terrorists would be really nice; but swaying the rest of the world that they're on the frontlines of blocking a global descent into medieval barbarism would be even better. The future looks sunny either way: between themselves and their most ferocious enemies, they have all but strangled the Syrian revolution stillborn and, with it, snuffed out the dying breath of the vaunted Arab spring. That great political wind which seemed to blow so hopefully in the liberal West's direction has at last settled on a new course of a colossal struggle for the fate of Islam in the third millennium.
Monday, September 26, 2016
Obama's real mistake in Syria: not renouncing regime change
The unfolding humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe in the Syrian city of Aleppo has given Barack Obama the occasion to reflect publicly on his fateful choice not to more deeply involve America in the destructive five-and-a-half-year civil war that has killed up to half a million people, displaced over 10 million others (internally and externally), and even spread its destabilizing effects to another continent (Europe).
But Obama seems to have been so consumed by the question of what would have happened had he intervened with direct military action in Syria that he's overlooked the bigger question: having renounced military coercion against the Syrian regime, why didn't he simply renounce regime change altogether?
The fact of the matter is, the Syrian conflict has dragged on only because Washington, even now, still supports the rebellion to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Through its Gulf Arab and Turkish allies, the US has funded and armed the insurgents who otherwise would have run out of money and materiel a long time ago. The whole covert war waged by the CIA alone has consumed billions of dollars since 2011 - an effort akin to the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Quite a pity that it's all gone to an ultimately losing effort.
It's not that Obama wasn't aware that it would very likely be a losing effort. He had held his fire in 2013 partly because he already knew that if he threatened Assad, the Iranians would immediately pull out of the then still largely secret nuclear deal deliberations, and partly because even then he was fearful of how Putin might react. In hindsight, that was the moment when he should have dropped the whole policy of regime change altogether: if the US wasn't going to lead the operation itself, it could only hope that its own regional allies would be able to out-escalate Assad's allies, but Obama was already aware of Moscow's and Tehran's bottom lines, so it's somewhat baffling why he still retained a diplomatic stance that depended on them not doing the utmost (in the end) to shore up their client state in Damascus.
Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, and Obama saw other factors at the time which were more favorable to staying the course of backing the revolution's primary goal. Neither Russia nor even Iran, he thought, wanted an indefinite quagmire in Syria, and he was convinced that US support for the rebels could sustain just such a stalemate. This belief persisted even after ISIS blew the whole region up in mid-2014 and created a new urgency to get the Syrian conflict over and done with.
It turns out, though, that Obama just never gave himself that bit of extra wiggle room that a more prudent or attentive realpolitik power broker would have: instead of conceding political and diplomatic ground to lock in military gains, the US-backed rebellion in 2014 and 2015 only became more uncompromising in its demand that Assad leave immediately to face a dishonorable exile at best or a war crimes tribunal at worst. This not only made it more likely that Assad would unleash even more havoc on the opposition and suck in even more brazen Iranian and Russian support, but it also closed off the best chance for a political settlement favorable to Washington, its regional allies, and the democratic West: a removal of Assad himself without the destruction of his regime.
With Assad's back against the wall in the spring of 2015, it would have been prudent to work with Putin to secure a political transition that would end with the Baathist paramount leadership's abdication under the condition of immunity from forced exile or prosecution for war crimes. The aim would have been to perform a "brain transplant" of the regime so that its mind could be altered while leaving its body intact, thereby allowing collaboration between loyalist and opposition elements to kickstart the creation of a more democratic order under a new constitution. Much further bloodshed could have been averted if the Obama administration pressed its utmost leverage on the opposition to enter into this process without regard for Assad's or his inner circle's personal fate; absent such a change of heart and strategy by the opposition, it can only have become an increasingly desperate all-or-nothing contest for the survival of the entire Syrian state, not merely Mr. Assad, and this ensured a descent into deeper and more savage violence - to ultimately pull in the Russians on top of the Iranians in support of the regime.
Instead, as we approach the anniversary of the Russian intervention in Syria, Obama and his top policymakers are smarting from having been effectively cornered into renouncing regime change because the rebels can only realistically bargain for much less - probably little more than their mere political survival at this point. Had they seized their position of strength in early 2015 to settle for something less than they aspired to but well within their hard military capability to secure, Assad would plausibly have become a mere private citizen surrounded by his heavily armed Alawite clan and perhaps a broader Alawite enclave on the Mediterranean coast under special UN protection, wondering whether his dubious future prospects in the country make it better for him to just emigrate to Iran or Russia.
The outgoing US president will have much to think about in the coming years, but eventually he'll recognize that on Syria, in the first place, he should have paid much closer attention to the crisis to be able to more proactively drive the opposition's negotiating strategy and tactics; then perhaps he would have had the "aha" moment he now concedes may have appeared to a Churchill or even an Eisenhower.
But Obama seems to have been so consumed by the question of what would have happened had he intervened with direct military action in Syria that he's overlooked the bigger question: having renounced military coercion against the Syrian regime, why didn't he simply renounce regime change altogether?
The fact of the matter is, the Syrian conflict has dragged on only because Washington, even now, still supports the rebellion to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Through its Gulf Arab and Turkish allies, the US has funded and armed the insurgents who otherwise would have run out of money and materiel a long time ago. The whole covert war waged by the CIA alone has consumed billions of dollars since 2011 - an effort akin to the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Quite a pity that it's all gone to an ultimately losing effort.
It's not that Obama wasn't aware that it would very likely be a losing effort. He had held his fire in 2013 partly because he already knew that if he threatened Assad, the Iranians would immediately pull out of the then still largely secret nuclear deal deliberations, and partly because even then he was fearful of how Putin might react. In hindsight, that was the moment when he should have dropped the whole policy of regime change altogether: if the US wasn't going to lead the operation itself, it could only hope that its own regional allies would be able to out-escalate Assad's allies, but Obama was already aware of Moscow's and Tehran's bottom lines, so it's somewhat baffling why he still retained a diplomatic stance that depended on them not doing the utmost (in the end) to shore up their client state in Damascus.
Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, and Obama saw other factors at the time which were more favorable to staying the course of backing the revolution's primary goal. Neither Russia nor even Iran, he thought, wanted an indefinite quagmire in Syria, and he was convinced that US support for the rebels could sustain just such a stalemate. This belief persisted even after ISIS blew the whole region up in mid-2014 and created a new urgency to get the Syrian conflict over and done with.
It turns out, though, that Obama just never gave himself that bit of extra wiggle room that a more prudent or attentive realpolitik power broker would have: instead of conceding political and diplomatic ground to lock in military gains, the US-backed rebellion in 2014 and 2015 only became more uncompromising in its demand that Assad leave immediately to face a dishonorable exile at best or a war crimes tribunal at worst. This not only made it more likely that Assad would unleash even more havoc on the opposition and suck in even more brazen Iranian and Russian support, but it also closed off the best chance for a political settlement favorable to Washington, its regional allies, and the democratic West: a removal of Assad himself without the destruction of his regime.
With Assad's back against the wall in the spring of 2015, it would have been prudent to work with Putin to secure a political transition that would end with the Baathist paramount leadership's abdication under the condition of immunity from forced exile or prosecution for war crimes. The aim would have been to perform a "brain transplant" of the regime so that its mind could be altered while leaving its body intact, thereby allowing collaboration between loyalist and opposition elements to kickstart the creation of a more democratic order under a new constitution. Much further bloodshed could have been averted if the Obama administration pressed its utmost leverage on the opposition to enter into this process without regard for Assad's or his inner circle's personal fate; absent such a change of heart and strategy by the opposition, it can only have become an increasingly desperate all-or-nothing contest for the survival of the entire Syrian state, not merely Mr. Assad, and this ensured a descent into deeper and more savage violence - to ultimately pull in the Russians on top of the Iranians in support of the regime.
Instead, as we approach the anniversary of the Russian intervention in Syria, Obama and his top policymakers are smarting from having been effectively cornered into renouncing regime change because the rebels can only realistically bargain for much less - probably little more than their mere political survival at this point. Had they seized their position of strength in early 2015 to settle for something less than they aspired to but well within their hard military capability to secure, Assad would plausibly have become a mere private citizen surrounded by his heavily armed Alawite clan and perhaps a broader Alawite enclave on the Mediterranean coast under special UN protection, wondering whether his dubious future prospects in the country make it better for him to just emigrate to Iran or Russia.
The outgoing US president will have much to think about in the coming years, but eventually he'll recognize that on Syria, in the first place, he should have paid much closer attention to the crisis to be able to more proactively drive the opposition's negotiating strategy and tactics; then perhaps he would have had the "aha" moment he now concedes may have appeared to a Churchill or even an Eisenhower.
Saturday, September 24, 2016
It's Hillary's judgment that's getting bombed to oblivion in Syria
Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Hillary Clinton was caught on video nearly fainting as she hurried to leave the 9/11 Memorial two weekends ago; not only was it the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, it was also the fourth anniversary of her darkest moment as Secretary of State - the storming of the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.
It's Hillary's whole foreign policy of "regime change" to eliminate secular dictators in the Middle East - which she aggressively pushed at the State Department in 2011 and 2012 - that's now being bombed to oblivion by the air forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his superpower patron, Vladimir Putin, in the besieged ruins of Aleppo, the Syrian city that's become the focal point of that country's five-and-a-half-year civil war.
Hillary undertook her stance against Mideast autocrats - indeed, autocrats everywhere - for declared humanitarian reasons, and for this alone she shouldn't be judged; what should always have been carefully assessed, however, is her own judgment as to how best to effect the kind of change and liberalization which her own political values and principles prioritized. You can have the highest ideals and loftiest plans to reach them in the whole world and then some, but in the end you'll be evaluated on how capably you actually executed your policies to deliver the intended results.
In this light, the further Syria polarizes between Assad's brutal regime on the one hand and the equally brutal Islamic extremists of the Al Qaeda and ISIS variety on the other, the more complete a failure Hillary's tenure as America's top diplomat is exposed to be; at the very least, it casts a dark pall over the entire basis of her campaign, which is that her experience alone qualifies her for the top job, as if experience alone equals prudence.
It gets considerably worse, of course, if you throw in her email scandal into the mix: just how much of her implicit support for Islamic extremists (so long as they were also for "regime change") was influenced by the millions poured into her "nonprofit" foundation by deep-pocketed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni clerics?
Whether she realizes it or not, Hillary's past decisions in the Middle East are now coming home to roost. The best she can hope for, in fact, is to gracefully completely flip-flop by renouncing her whole agenda of eliminating dictatorships she doesn't like without weighing the potential consequence of unleashing even worse regional and global instability.
Instead, you have to wonder if she'll be brain-dead enough - or so much in thrall to Saudi oil money and neocon bureaucrats at Langley and the Pentagon - that even now she'll propose we bomb Syria and risk a shooting war with nuclear superpower Russia.
It's Hillary's whole foreign policy of "regime change" to eliminate secular dictators in the Middle East - which she aggressively pushed at the State Department in 2011 and 2012 - that's now being bombed to oblivion by the air forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his superpower patron, Vladimir Putin, in the besieged ruins of Aleppo, the Syrian city that's become the focal point of that country's five-and-a-half-year civil war.
Hillary undertook her stance against Mideast autocrats - indeed, autocrats everywhere - for declared humanitarian reasons, and for this alone she shouldn't be judged; what should always have been carefully assessed, however, is her own judgment as to how best to effect the kind of change and liberalization which her own political values and principles prioritized. You can have the highest ideals and loftiest plans to reach them in the whole world and then some, but in the end you'll be evaluated on how capably you actually executed your policies to deliver the intended results.
In this light, the further Syria polarizes between Assad's brutal regime on the one hand and the equally brutal Islamic extremists of the Al Qaeda and ISIS variety on the other, the more complete a failure Hillary's tenure as America's top diplomat is exposed to be; at the very least, it casts a dark pall over the entire basis of her campaign, which is that her experience alone qualifies her for the top job, as if experience alone equals prudence.
It gets considerably worse, of course, if you throw in her email scandal into the mix: just how much of her implicit support for Islamic extremists (so long as they were also for "regime change") was influenced by the millions poured into her "nonprofit" foundation by deep-pocketed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni clerics?
Whether she realizes it or not, Hillary's past decisions in the Middle East are now coming home to roost. The best she can hope for, in fact, is to gracefully completely flip-flop by renouncing her whole agenda of eliminating dictatorships she doesn't like without weighing the potential consequence of unleashing even worse regional and global instability.
Instead, you have to wonder if she'll be brain-dead enough - or so much in thrall to Saudi oil money and neocon bureaucrats at Langley and the Pentagon - that even now she'll propose we bomb Syria and risk a shooting war with nuclear superpower Russia.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Syria is the price America must pay for underestimating Russian power
Breaking what was quickly becoming a deafening silence on the whole issue in light of its recent dramatic turn for the worse, Obama openly admits that the Syrian civil war "haunts" him as he prepares to wrap up his eight-year presidency.
With no end to the five-and-a-half-year conflict in sight, even as fatalities approach up to half a million, such an acknowledgement from a leader known for reservation and lack of hyperbole underscores just what a disaster Syria has become for US foreign policy.
Obviously, Obama's immediate interest is to defend his own decision-making against the storm of criticism that's sure to intensify in his final months in office; this indicates that with Kerry's diplomacy having failed, he's essentially checking out of the Syrian crisis altogether.
Kerry's latest proposal that both Russia and Syria ground their warplanes in the wake of the ceasefire's collapse was nothing short of ludicrous desperation: his plea's spectacular failure has forced the poor Pentagon chiefs to yet again clarify to Congress that such a US-imposed no-fly zone amounts to a declaration of war against both Assad and Putin. A war that was already off the table against Syria alone back in 2013, and which has become sheer fantasy since Russia's intervention a year ago.
The Obama administration is now confronted with its most obvious shortcoming of the entire Syrian morass: namely, that while it's stopped pursuing regime change in Damascus, it simply can't renounce it either.
America's halfhearted commitment to this maximalist goal - removing Assad - was already plainly exposed by Obama's backtrack on the "red line" of chemical weapons use three years ago, which initially opened the door to Russia's upending of the US role in Syria. Thereafter, Washington fanned the flames of the Syrian insurgency with monetary and arms assistance via its Gulf and Turkish allies, in the ultimately accurate calculation that this would out-escalate the intensified Iranian and Hezbollah support for the Syrian regime. But everyone in Washington from Obama on down severely underestimated Putin's Russia: not only Moscow's resolve to retain its strategic outpost on the eastern Mediterranean, but even more so the raw power it would bring to bear (pun intended) to do so.
So Syria is the price America must pay to learn this lesson - except don't hold your breath that we'll actually learn it. Unless Trump first upsets Hillary and then effectively fires the entire defense-intelligence Beltway brass, we can only fall back to more halfhearted (even quarter-hearted) measures to try to achieve even more outlandish goals (i.e. booting Russia out of Ukraine); we will suffer ever more humiliating defeats that make Russia and Putin specifically look even bigger.
With no end to the five-and-a-half-year conflict in sight, even as fatalities approach up to half a million, such an acknowledgement from a leader known for reservation and lack of hyperbole underscores just what a disaster Syria has become for US foreign policy.
Obviously, Obama's immediate interest is to defend his own decision-making against the storm of criticism that's sure to intensify in his final months in office; this indicates that with Kerry's diplomacy having failed, he's essentially checking out of the Syrian crisis altogether.
Kerry's latest proposal that both Russia and Syria ground their warplanes in the wake of the ceasefire's collapse was nothing short of ludicrous desperation: his plea's spectacular failure has forced the poor Pentagon chiefs to yet again clarify to Congress that such a US-imposed no-fly zone amounts to a declaration of war against both Assad and Putin. A war that was already off the table against Syria alone back in 2013, and which has become sheer fantasy since Russia's intervention a year ago.
The Obama administration is now confronted with its most obvious shortcoming of the entire Syrian morass: namely, that while it's stopped pursuing regime change in Damascus, it simply can't renounce it either.
America's halfhearted commitment to this maximalist goal - removing Assad - was already plainly exposed by Obama's backtrack on the "red line" of chemical weapons use three years ago, which initially opened the door to Russia's upending of the US role in Syria. Thereafter, Washington fanned the flames of the Syrian insurgency with monetary and arms assistance via its Gulf and Turkish allies, in the ultimately accurate calculation that this would out-escalate the intensified Iranian and Hezbollah support for the Syrian regime. But everyone in Washington from Obama on down severely underestimated Putin's Russia: not only Moscow's resolve to retain its strategic outpost on the eastern Mediterranean, but even more so the raw power it would bring to bear (pun intended) to do so.
So Syria is the price America must pay to learn this lesson - except don't hold your breath that we'll actually learn it. Unless Trump first upsets Hillary and then effectively fires the entire defense-intelligence Beltway brass, we can only fall back to more halfhearted (even quarter-hearted) measures to try to achieve even more outlandish goals (i.e. booting Russia out of Ukraine); we will suffer ever more humiliating defeats that make Russia and Putin specifically look even bigger.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
US now reduced to pretending it's not losing badly in Syria
As the Syrian ceasefire rapidly dissolves into little more than a diplomatic facade, a cornered Barack Obama has resorted to reminding the world that there simply isn't a plausible military solution to the Syrian conflict, as if merely pleading with the Russians, Iranians, and Syrian regime about how long and tough the fighting ahead will be can deter them now, despite having failed to do so in the past.
The problem is, this is the same Obama who confidently proclaimed a year ago that the Russians were stumbling into a quagmire like the US fiasco in Iraq by entering the already protracted Syrian civil war on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad. As it is, a year later the situation is anything but a quagmire from Moscow's perspective.
The Kremlin has achieved its primary goal: militarily stabilizing the core areas of the Assad regime in western Syria, including the capital of Damascus in the southwest, the major cities of Homs and Hama in the west-central region, and the entire Mediterranean coast to include the largest port, Latakia in the northwest, as well as the important Russian naval installation at Tartus further south. Between these key urban areas, their interconnecting supply routes and substantial surrounding control buffers, the pro-regime coalition has essentially secured nearly two-thirds of the remaining Syrian population.
Should the shattered commercial center of Aleppo in the far north fall as well, this will jump to about three-quarters; it is recognized by all parties to the conflict that an Assad victory in Aleppo - a distinct possibility in the coming weeks - will be a potentially lethal blow to the non-ISIS insurgency trying to force him to abdicate.
With a contiguous stretch of territory from Aleppo all the way down to Damascus, the regime will have locked down the lion's share of "useful Syria" - the best farmland, the traditional centers of industry and commerce, and most especially all access to the sea. Even though ISIS will still physically control much of Syria's oil and gas reserves in the desert hinterland, whilst the rebels will retain their enclave in northwestern Idlib province and part of neighboring Aleppo province, the extent of this military victory will be such that Assad will no longer be under pressure to enact a political transition that incorporates the Syrian opposition.
At that point, the combination of military and political advantage at the disposal of the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers will be formidable: the government-held sector will be wealthier and more populous than the rebel, Kurdish, and ISIS sectors put together. It will further be aided by the fact that each of these three rival statelets will be hostile to one another, perhaps even more so than any will be to Damascus; tensions between the Kurds and the non-ISIS rebels will prove especially useful for Assad to stoke to "divide and rule" the northwestern and north-central region near the Turkish frontier.
Realistically, unless the new goal of Assad's enemies becomes outright partition, the war will essentially be over - the Russia-Iran-Syrian regime alliance will have won, the US-Turkey-Saudi-Syrian opposition coalition will have lost. Fighting will continue, but the political contest which the whole war was all about will have been decided. ISIS meanwhile will have become practically a sideshow.
Indeed, this militarily driven political conclusion to the Syrian conflict may be much closer than Obama thinks or admits. If he's still betting on a diplomatic peace process, even he should realize by now that it will largely be on Assad's, Putin's, and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei's terms - in other words, practically impossible. But if there's anything his administration has demonstrated when it comes to foreign policy, it's that when all else fails, hope alone apparently becomes the fallback strategy.
So the US is now reduced to pretending that it's not losing - quite badly, to be honest - in Syria. And it will probably be all the worse precisely because its official hopeful statements are set to become ever more divorced from harsh realities on the ground.
The problem is, this is the same Obama who confidently proclaimed a year ago that the Russians were stumbling into a quagmire like the US fiasco in Iraq by entering the already protracted Syrian civil war on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad. As it is, a year later the situation is anything but a quagmire from Moscow's perspective.
The Kremlin has achieved its primary goal: militarily stabilizing the core areas of the Assad regime in western Syria, including the capital of Damascus in the southwest, the major cities of Homs and Hama in the west-central region, and the entire Mediterranean coast to include the largest port, Latakia in the northwest, as well as the important Russian naval installation at Tartus further south. Between these key urban areas, their interconnecting supply routes and substantial surrounding control buffers, the pro-regime coalition has essentially secured nearly two-thirds of the remaining Syrian population.
Should the shattered commercial center of Aleppo in the far north fall as well, this will jump to about three-quarters; it is recognized by all parties to the conflict that an Assad victory in Aleppo - a distinct possibility in the coming weeks - will be a potentially lethal blow to the non-ISIS insurgency trying to force him to abdicate.
With a contiguous stretch of territory from Aleppo all the way down to Damascus, the regime will have locked down the lion's share of "useful Syria" - the best farmland, the traditional centers of industry and commerce, and most especially all access to the sea. Even though ISIS will still physically control much of Syria's oil and gas reserves in the desert hinterland, whilst the rebels will retain their enclave in northwestern Idlib province and part of neighboring Aleppo province, the extent of this military victory will be such that Assad will no longer be under pressure to enact a political transition that incorporates the Syrian opposition.
At that point, the combination of military and political advantage at the disposal of the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers will be formidable: the government-held sector will be wealthier and more populous than the rebel, Kurdish, and ISIS sectors put together. It will further be aided by the fact that each of these three rival statelets will be hostile to one another, perhaps even more so than any will be to Damascus; tensions between the Kurds and the non-ISIS rebels will prove especially useful for Assad to stoke to "divide and rule" the northwestern and north-central region near the Turkish frontier.
Realistically, unless the new goal of Assad's enemies becomes outright partition, the war will essentially be over - the Russia-Iran-Syrian regime alliance will have won, the US-Turkey-Saudi-Syrian opposition coalition will have lost. Fighting will continue, but the political contest which the whole war was all about will have been decided. ISIS meanwhile will have become practically a sideshow.
Indeed, this militarily driven political conclusion to the Syrian conflict may be much closer than Obama thinks or admits. If he's still betting on a diplomatic peace process, even he should realize by now that it will largely be on Assad's, Putin's, and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei's terms - in other words, practically impossible. But if there's anything his administration has demonstrated when it comes to foreign policy, it's that when all else fails, hope alone apparently becomes the fallback strategy.
So the US is now reduced to pretending that it's not losing - quite badly, to be honest - in Syria. And it will probably be all the worse precisely because its official hopeful statements are set to become ever more divorced from harsh realities on the ground.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
It's all over: Syria just sent a fat F*CK YOU to America
The Syrian ceasefire isn't dead yet! So says the US and Russia - more accurately, so Washington is literally begging Moscow to agree with it that it hasn't just been punched in the face by the Syrian government with a big fat F*CK YOU written all over it...
The Syrian regime is now openly attacking US regional interests: having convinced its people that the US-led airstrike which killed nearly 100 of their brave soldiers over the weekend was a deliberate provocation - if not by the Obama administration, then at least by the CIA and/or Pentagon as part of covert Washington's long-running clandestine war for "regime change" - the Assad government is ruthlessly making it known that it wants to stick it to the hated Zionist entity before the entire international community.
What better way to do it than to destroy a UN aid convoy just as the UN General Assembly is convening its annual conclave in New York, with Syria and the refugee crisis the main topics?
Notwithstanding the standard denials from Damascus, it's absolutely obvious that the attack on the column of UN humanitarian assistance trucks near the besieged cauldron of Aleppo - and apparently a stationary support installation as well - was carefully premeditated to have the maximum destructive effect on the already defunct US-Russia ceasefire of September 12. This merciless multiple-wave bombardment of noncombatants, to pointedly include those who came to the rescue of those mauled by the first strike, has been a hallmark of the Syrian air force's most enraged outbursts for the past five years; it leaves no trace of doubt that this was a personal message Mr. Assad was sending to Obama and Kerry.
"WE'VE HAD IT with your refusal to renounce your FUTILE policy of regime change...we're now entitled to more of our own "accidents" against your imperialist interests and proxies on our own sovereign soil...F*CK YOU...YOU ZIONIST PIGS...COME AND GET US NOW! WE ARE READY TO MURDER YOU AND ANY OF YOUR FRIENDS!"
So how will Obama respond? More accurately, how will he try to shove his own head in the sand now as the Syrian fire reignites and burns out of control?
If at any time hope alone has been a foreign policy, that describes the American situation in Syria right now.
It's all over, folks...September 20, 2016 will be remembered as the day the US cop got its rear end kicked out of the hood that is the contemporary Middle East.
It's all downhill from here - in Syria, with Iran, in the China Seas, and last but not least in Ukraine and central and eastern Europe...
The Beltway defense-intelligence complex must have its revenge - somehow, somewhere - and very soon.
Because with Trump rising in the polls, the next regime change will be here in Washington.
The Syrian regime is now openly attacking US regional interests: having convinced its people that the US-led airstrike which killed nearly 100 of their brave soldiers over the weekend was a deliberate provocation - if not by the Obama administration, then at least by the CIA and/or Pentagon as part of covert Washington's long-running clandestine war for "regime change" - the Assad government is ruthlessly making it known that it wants to stick it to the hated Zionist entity before the entire international community.
What better way to do it than to destroy a UN aid convoy just as the UN General Assembly is convening its annual conclave in New York, with Syria and the refugee crisis the main topics?
Notwithstanding the standard denials from Damascus, it's absolutely obvious that the attack on the column of UN humanitarian assistance trucks near the besieged cauldron of Aleppo - and apparently a stationary support installation as well - was carefully premeditated to have the maximum destructive effect on the already defunct US-Russia ceasefire of September 12. This merciless multiple-wave bombardment of noncombatants, to pointedly include those who came to the rescue of those mauled by the first strike, has been a hallmark of the Syrian air force's most enraged outbursts for the past five years; it leaves no trace of doubt that this was a personal message Mr. Assad was sending to Obama and Kerry.
"WE'VE HAD IT with your refusal to renounce your FUTILE policy of regime change...we're now entitled to more of our own "accidents" against your imperialist interests and proxies on our own sovereign soil...F*CK YOU...YOU ZIONIST PIGS...COME AND GET US NOW! WE ARE READY TO MURDER YOU AND ANY OF YOUR FRIENDS!"
So how will Obama respond? More accurately, how will he try to shove his own head in the sand now as the Syrian fire reignites and burns out of control?
If at any time hope alone has been a foreign policy, that describes the American situation in Syria right now.
It's all over, folks...September 20, 2016 will be remembered as the day the US cop got its rear end kicked out of the hood that is the contemporary Middle East.
It's all downhill from here - in Syria, with Iran, in the China Seas, and last but not least in Ukraine and central and eastern Europe...
The Beltway defense-intelligence complex must have its revenge - somehow, somewhere - and very soon.
Because with Trump rising in the polls, the next regime change will be here in Washington.
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