Putin Is Herding the US into a Trap

The idea for the title didn’t come from me, but from Joshua Landis, author of an article in the German newspaper Die Welt. “Russia,” he writes in the Sept. 15 issue, “is taking advantage of the West’s feeble-mindedness [Kopflosigkeit] regarding foreign policy.”

On one hand, Europe and the U.S. want to destroy the terrorist militia Islamic State group. On the other hand, they want to get rid of Bashar Assad. Putin, via his military actions in Syria, is saying, “You can’t have both.” About the dilemma in the West, the article says that either the West supports Russia and uses Assad to stop the expansion of the Islamic State group and curb the influx of refugees to Europe, or the West continues its struggle against Assad, which means having to accept many new refugees. The author’s conclusion: “Whoever wants to halt the flow of refugees into Europe cannot destroy Assad.”

We see here an unorthodox approach to the problem. The focus is on the refugees that have flooded into Europe and are turning into a nightmare for them. For Europe to shake free from this, the war, which has already chopped the unified state of Syria into several bloodied fragments, has to be stopped. And for this to happen, the monster Islamic State group has to be annihilated. But now that the coalition created by America last year is clearly not capable of handling the Islamic State group, it has to let Russia try its hand. That outcome would allow Europe to breathe easy, and the whole world would no longer be threatened by the worst form of terrorism. It seems that this view is in harmony with the general features of Putin’s so-called “plan,” which, if we believe the press, will be unveiled at the next session of the U.N. General Assembly. The reasoning at work here will be quite persuasive for many, including accomplished journalists in the United States.

In similar fashion, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, who now has the ears of Washington more than Kissinger and Brzezinski did (besides them, no other figures of this kind are well-known in Russia), has long insisted that the U.S. has to stop its campaign against Assad and work with him to come down on a common enemy. And indeed, from a common sense point of view, this is the action that needs to be taken, especially now that an agreement has been reached on Iran’s nuclear program. After all, this means that Iran is no longer the main irreconcilable enemy of the U.S., and that it no longer poses an immediate threat of war by developing a nuclear bomb. It means that Israel, which refuses to tolerate a nuclear Iran, is no longer poised to bomb the Iranians and drag Washington into a confrontation. Now America will remove its sanctions on Iran, and a diplomatic relationship will be established with time. And this prompts us to ask: Who cares about Assad? All in all, his only fault in the eyes of the West is that he is a partner and ally to Iran. Apart from that, he isn’t causing anyone any grief. He’s just idling in Damascus, not doing anyone any harm; whereas from the Islamic State group we can expect only the horrific and unspeakable.

And here we have validation from an unexpected source. None other than our U.N. Representative Vitaly Churkin, who, in an interview with Russia 24 and RT, said that the U.S. “doesn’t want the Assad government to fall… It’s completely clear that one of the most serious concerns of the American government right now is that the Assad regime will fall and ISIS will take Damascus – and that the U.S. will be held responsible.”

Churkin is absolutely right. If Assad is overthrown, Damascus will suffer the fate of Kabul after the departure of Soviet forces; a merciless war for a demolished city, waged between Islamic extremist groups, and in the end, the triumph of the most cruel and genocidal among them. In this scenario, Obama would go down in history as the president who allowed Syria to be seized by the most vicious enemies of America; by monsters, brought up by Osama bin Laden, who as far back as the end of the 20th century cried out for true believers to kill as many Americans as possible. And kill they did. Indeed, during the occupation of Iraq, 7 out of 10 American soldiers fell at the hands of Sunni insurgents, among them soldiers for the local al-Qaida affiliate, since renamed the Islamic State group. Which is really worse for America? Is it really the bankrupt and washed up Assad, who’s just barely hanging on to control of 20 or 25 percent of Syria’s territory?

Given all this, what’s standing in the way of a “Grand Bargain” between Obama and Putin? A bargain so “grand” that some of our commentators have even entertained the following fantasy: The Russian president commits to rescuing humanity, and therefore also the West, from an Islamic monstrosity, and the American president gratefully forgets about Crimea and looks the other way on Donbass in exchange. And everyone is happy. Obama doesn’t have to lose one American soldier, only the blood of some Russian “Ivans” will be shed, and Putin gets free reign in Ukraine. And who knows? Maybe they will quietly start lifting the sanctions against Russia.

But there is something standing in the way. If we look at the military aspect of the matter, there is an impression, of which most people are convinced, that there is a clear front line with Assad’s army on one side and the Islamic State group’s fighters on the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. These two armies are adjoined in two or three places, and the level of engagement there is minuscule. In general, the government army keeps the “moderate opposition” (the Free Syrian Army) and the Islamic insurgents who haven’t joined the Islamic State group at bay. Of the latter, the strongest group is the Nusra Front, which is battling Assad with one hand and the Islamic State group with the other. In order to reach the regions controlled by the Islamic State group and take care of the real villains, Russian troops have to knock out the remaining insurgencies. This would require significant casualties. The Islamist jihadi, now fighting amongst themselves, would doubtlessly come together, and the troops would have to carry out street battles in half-destroyed cities with savage and fearless fanatics, for whom the greatest happiness is to die for their faith. It’s easy to imagine how the Russian public would perceive this. Donbass is one thing; there it looks like Russian people are being protected from a “fascist junta.” It’s quite another thing to die helping one group of Arabs kill another.

What about airstrikes? Well, the Washington-formed coalition has been bombing the Islamic State group for a whole year. Air forces from the U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Denmark, Australia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey are all participating in the attacks. It hasn’t done any good, first of all, because there are no observers on the ground to point out bomb targets to the pilots, and second of all — and this is even more important — there’s a political issue here. They’re bombing at half-steam because they are afraid of killing large numbers of non-combatants. The fact is that the terrorists, as they often do, are hiding within the population. In order to eliminate one terrorist, you have to kill at least 10 civilians, and the very next day our modern-day media would have the bloodied bodies of women and children splayed across the screen. These victims would be Sunnis, and in the Arab world — I’m not afraid to repeat it, it’s so crucial — in 20 out of 21 countries, the overwhelming majority are Sunni. If Obama doesn’t want to go down in history as a murderer of children, and if he doesn’t want his Sunni allies to see him as initiating an alliance between Shias, Iranians, Americans and Zionists, he can’t rain down on the Islamic State group with all his air power. And why should Putin take this all on himself?

The “New Anti-terrorist Coalition,” which supposedly will be much more effective than the current one, really consists of the very same elements. Syria is still fighting, but things are getting worse for the Assad regime. Things could be shored up with a massive amount of Russian assistance, but this is a double-edged sword; all of the Western world would see Russia’s actions as a simple ploy to save Assad on the pretext of battling the Islamic State group, and Putin’s “plan” might very well be rejected for this reason. The Kurds are fighting for their autonomy; they won’t go past the limits of their territory. Iran has no border with Syria. They’d have to cross through Iraq, but sending Persian soldiers there is out of the question, given the thousand-year animosity between Arabs and Persians and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The neighboring Arab governments will, in the best case, limit their involvement in air attacks; they won’t send ground troops under any circumstances, again because of the Sunni factor. That’s all there is to it.

But even if all this were different, that would still leave the main global geopolitical factor: the confrontation between Russia and the West, the new Cold War. Those who say “but we were able to reach an agreement about chemical weapons in Syria the year before last,” are forgetting that all of this was before Crimea and Donbass. Everything is different now. Of course Obama understands that if we’re only looking at the Syrian situation, the worst-case scenario is a caliphate with a capital in Damascus. But Obama has to keep a wider view. He looks around him, and what does he see? Congress, controlled by his Republican enemies, is pecking at him constantly, more than anything because of his “weakness and helplessness” regarding the political situation in Syria. If he meets Putin halfway, not only the Republicans but the greater part of the U.S. public will see him as a weakling, a loser, if not a complete defeatist. Anti-Putin propaganda is working its magic, after all. He also sees the Turkish president Erdoğan, a sworn enemy of Assad; he sees Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all of which would never miss a chance to destroy Shiite power in Damascus. And he sees the faces of thousands of journalists, TV personalities and career politicians, who are, with unfathomable rage, dumping a tank of filth on him just for allowing Putin to take root in the Near East. And we return to the beginning. Is this a trap set by Putin? It’s possible, but it often happens that wild animals tear themselves out of a snare, leaving a severed paw behind. It’s clear that Obama will come out of his eight-year term with at least one paw missing. But he won’t allow Putin to get the upper hand on the West.

There’s little chance that he can pull off a sophisticated maneuver to remove Assad from power and replace him with some less odious figure. Those who have been fighting for four years, spilling their blood and burying their comrades, will only agree to Assad’s full removal, and they won’t accept another Alawite regime. For them, Assad’s departure has already become a symbol with the potential to spark the chain of events that would rapidly bring destruction to the system that has sustained the privileged status of the Alawites. Everyone remembers the fate of Iraqi Sunnis after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Does the Kremlin understand all this? Hopefully yes. But something might be pushing them toward the East. They are not about to wage a real war, but a powerful military presence in the Arab world wouldn’t hurt. It goes without saying that the general balance of power in the region won’t change. As the author of an article from Sept. 17 in London’s Financial Times said, “So many factions are fighting each other in Syria that adding a contingent of little green men won’t make the situation significantly worse. A good bet, though, is that, whatever Mr. Putin is up to in Syria, Russian intervention is unlikely to make it better.” Overall, there are no good options for ending the war in Syria, only bad ones, terrible ones and nightmarish ones. But even in the worst case it will always be possible to say, “We did not stray from our main commitment to support lawful governance. And if that governance could not hold out, well then here yet again we can see the nature of the West’s aggressive policies; they force their own order on others with their hegemony and veracity.” The people will understand. And they’ll approve.