Obama: Putin’s intervention in Syria is ‘a recipe for disaster’
Ynetnews/News Agencies/10.03.15/US president calls Russian strategy ‘self-defeating’, vows there will be no proxy war; US said to be rethinking strategy against ISIS in Syria. Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian Civil War is “a recipe for disaster”, US President Barack Obama said Friday, less than a week after Moscow began airstrikes to support Syrian President Bashar Assad. Obama vehemently rejected Russia’s military actions in Syria as self-defeating and dismissed the idea that Moscow was strengthening its hand in the region. He vowed not to let the conflict become a US-Russia “proxy war.”
At a White House news conference on Friday, Obama pledged to stay the course with his strategy of supporting moderate rebels who oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad, but he dodged questions about whether the US would protect them if they came under Russian attack. Russia’s dramatic entry into the Syrian Civil War, after a year of airstrikes by the US and its coalition partners, has raised the specter of dangerous confrontations in the skies over Syria.
And it prompted a question at the news conference as to whether Putin was outfoxing the US at a time when the American-led military campaign in Syria has failed to weaken the Islamic State. Obama dismissed that idea with an expression of disdain.”This is not a smart strategic move on Russia’s part,” he said, referring to Putin’s decision to “double down” on his support for Assad by stationing warplanes, air defenses, tanks and troops in Syria. Moscow says it is targeting Islamic State forces and fighting terrorism, but US leaders are skeptical of that and Obama said the Russian president has overplayed his hand.
“It’s only strengthening ISIL, and that’s not good for anybody,” Obama contended. He said he hoped Putin would come to realize that allying Russia with Iran to try to keep Assad in power “is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work. And they will be there for a while if they don’t take a different course.” Obama said Putin has stepped deeper into a conflict that cannot be solved by military power alone, and that his approach is misguided in not distinguishing between Syrian rebels who want Assad ousted and those who are terrorists. “From their perspective they’re all terrorists, and that’s a recipe for disaster,” Obama said in his most extensive comments on the topic since Russia began its airstrikes on Monday. Evoking the Cold War era of US and Soviet forces working behind the scenes to prop up client states, Obama added, “We’re not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the United States and Russia.”
Asked if he felt out-smarted by Putin, Obama argued that Putin was acting in Syria out of political weakness and trying to gin up support at home while Russia’s own economy struggles. “As a consequence of these brilliant moves, their economy is contracting 4 percent this year. They’re isolated in the world community,” Obama said, noting that Russia is under international sanctions for its military intervention in Ukraine. “Russia’s not strong as a consequence of what they’ve been doing. They get attention,” he said. “Mr. Putin’s action have been successful only insofar as it’s boosted his poll ratings inside Russia, which may be why the Beltway is so impressed because that tends to be the measure of the success.”
Still, Russia’s airstrikes have forced the Pentagon to grapple with whether the US should use military force to protect American-trained and -equipped Syrian rebels now that they may be the targets of Russian airstrikes. Senior military leaders and others are working through the thorny legal and foreign policy issues surrounding that subject and are weighing the risks of using force in response to a Russian attack, US officials said Thursday. Pentagon leaders have consistently said the US must take steps to protect the US-trained rebels because it would be far more difficult to recruit fighters without those assurances. Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters in March that the US has an obligation to support them, “and we’re working through what kinds of support and under what conditions we would do so.”
US officials later made it clear that rebels trained by the US would receive air support in the event they were attacked by either Islamic State militants or Syrian government troops. Currently, that protection would apply only to about 80 US-trained Syrian rebels who are back in Syria fighting with their units. The US policy so far is very specific. It doesn’t address a potential attack by Russian planes and does not include Syrian rebels who have not been through the US military training. A key concern is the prospect of US getting drawn into a proxy war with Russia in the event that Russian warplanes hit moderate Syrian rebels who have been trained and equipped by the US military.
US considers rethinking strategy
Meanwhile, a report on Friday said that according to officials, the US is considering extending support to thousands of Syrian rebel fighters, possibly with arms and air strikes, to help them push Islamic State from a strategic pocket of Syrian territory along the Turkish border. A decision, the officials said, would likely be made as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the US military’s support for rebels to fight Islamic State following setbacks that have all but killed a “train-and-equip” program. The proposal under consideration is for the United States and Turkey to support an amalgamation of largely Arab fighters and would include members of multiple ethnic groups, US officials say. Turkey, wary of Kurdish aspirations to create an independent state, does not want to see Kurdish forces control more of the Syrian side of their border. The fighters, who were proposed by Turkey, include some who have received U.S. vetting, the officials say. It’s unclear how many Syrian fighters have received US vetting, although the military acknowledges reviewing upwards of 8,000 potential recruits, many of whom were deemed ineligible for training. “We don’t have a problem with that (Turkish selection),” said one US military official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, and cautioning that the matter was still under review by the Obama administration.
Misanalysis Makes a Mess
Robert Satloff and James F. Jeffrey/American Interest/October 03/15
U.S. policy in Syria is failing because the Obama administration is prioritizing the urgent (rolling back ISIS) over the truly important (preventing Iran and Russia from rearranging Middle East security to their benefit). Does the Obama administration support or oppose Russia’s brazen deployment of military force in Syria? Amazingly, it is tough to tell. On the one hand, in his United Nations speech, President Obama offered a thinly veiled denunciation of Russia when he pointedly stated that “some major powers assert themselves in ways that contravene international law.” But on the other hand, Secretary of State Kerry lauded the “fundamental principles” Washington shares with Moscow in Syria and even stood next to his Russian counterpart at a press conference just hours after Russian warplanes attacked rebels — anti-Bashar al-Assad but not pro-ISIS — in an in-your-face display of Moscow’s true priorities. After Washington lamely called for Assad’s departure for four years, one cannot fault America’s regional allies for interpreting President Obama’s cynical acceptance of Assad’s continued and open-ended rule as a blessing of sorts for the muscular defense of the embattled Syrian leader by the new Russia-Iran axis.
How did we get caught in this muddle? How did the perfectly natural American outrage at the brutal nihilists of ISIS shape-shift into a supine response to the most direct and serious Russian challenge to America’s global position in four decades, a nonchalant acceptance of Iran’s deployment of troops and materiel to the Mediterranean littoral, and a willingness to legitimize the continued rule of a maniacal despot responsible for more than a quarter million killed and the depopulation of nearly half his entire country?
The answer is that this policy is the logical extension of a principle that has been at the heart of President Obama’s approach to the Middle East for the past seven years. This is the idea that the world had consigned to history “20th-century threats” to global peace — especially, the appetites for power, prestige, and wealth of voracious states — leaving in its wake only the still serious but very different “21st-century challenges” of failed states, climate change, and so on.
As applied by the Obama administration, this idea has had three corollaries. The first, following the Bush administration and public opinion in the wake of the September 11 attacks, is that Sunni jihadist terrorism — represented first by al-Qaeda and now by ISIS, a threat fueled by the blinding corruption, ideological extremism, and gross mismanagement of Sunni-led states — represents an existential threat to the West, akin to the thousands of Soviet warheads once aimed at American cities. Against this threat, it is legitimate to deploy American military assets, but only in targeted and limited ways, such as dispatching Seal Team Six to kill Osama bin Laden.
That is because of the second corollary, which holds that America cannot and should not wield power to navigate the threats of disorder the way it wielded power to confront traditional aggressors; indeed, wielding such power (so the argument goes) only aggravates some of the most dangerous threats we face and diverts us from the alleged real job of “fixing” the root social and political causes of disorder. But the 21st-century world is also one of opportunities, not just limitations. One such opportunity was the third corollary — the opportunity to bring Iran in from the cold, where it could be transformed from a radical, nuclear-proliferating, renegade state into a rule-abiding, status quo partner in the fight against the jihadists.
Each of these ideas is wrong. Some are obviously wrong; clearly, for instance, rapacious states have survived into the postmodern era, and old-fashioned force must sometimes be used to protect our allies and interests against them. As for Iran, whatever the wisdom of a narrow arrangement to postpone its nuclear weapons ambitions, it is farcical to believe that the Supreme Leader can be a true partner of the United States in any common enterprise. The spectacle of American diplomats chasing after the Iranians at the United Nations last week to engage their help in an array of regional concerns, only to be rebuffed, was both sad and revealing.
The most difficult of these wrong ideas for Americans to internalize is the real scope of the terrorist threat. The enormity of 9/11 made “Never Again” the motto of two administrations, with “Again” defined so broadly as to include everything from cataclysmic attack to lone-wolf incidents in Times Square, Chattanooga, and Fort Hood. The result is to blur the distinction between terrorism that can threaten the fiber of a nation, against which successive presidents rightly unleashed the full power of our military, intelligence, and law enforcement capabilities, and terrorism that — however horrific — may be the unacceptable but perhaps inevitable price of leading the world’s liberal democracies.
Where does ISIS fit in this? Its potential to execute or certainly inspire terrorism short of a 9/11 mass casualty attack is significant, given the allegiance to it by many Muslims, its resources, and the total war it preaches against the rest of the world. But that threat still remains largely potential, with the likelihood of a catastrophic ISIS attack on the homeland not substantially greater today as a result of its success in creating a caliphate in western Iraq and eastern Syria.
To be sure, even if ISIS is not now a threat to the homeland, destroying it is justifiably an urgent priority for international action. ISIS has enslaved as many as ten million people, threatens to seize even more of Iraq and Syria, and is a major contributor to the downward spiral of dysfunction not only destroying the Middle East but sending hundreds of thousands of refugees looking for shelter in Europe. But urgent is not the same as important. The important priority is preventing the Russian-Iranian alliance from demolishing the regional security system by establishing a substantial security presence inside Syria, from which the two could — separately and together — project power throughout the Levant, cynically exacerbate the refugee crisis, and advance security, diplomatic, and possibly even energy policies to protect their friends and interests.
Taken together, the administration’s wrong assumptions led it to an analysis that misreads the Middle East situation, and to a set of policies that misprioritizes the urgent (rolling back ISIS) over the important (preventing anti-American, anti-Western powers from rearranging Middle East security to their benefit). But it’s not too late. If the Russian-Iranian power-play in Syria, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a generation ago, compels the president to reassess his policy, he will find that has realistic options. The smartest of those options fall far short of launching another ill-fated Iraq-style massive military operation, which is the usual “alternative” option asserted by the president’s advisers.
Specifically, the president should operate on the basis that, while defeating ISIS cannot be the highest priority, hitting it hard can also checkmate both Vladimir Putin and Iran’s chief strategist, the Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Suleimani. This includes rapidly increasing operations against ISIS — with more U.S. ground forces deployed as advisers, forward controllers, raiders, and in some cases armored spearheads — with the goal of retaking terrain. We should reach out to Turkey to create a safe-zone in northern Syria, get as serious about a CIA-led anti-Assad/anti-ISIS rebel-training program as we were with the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, and reinforce local allies (including Israel) with the military assets to counter the best the Russians can put into the field. Whatever relations we have with the Russian-Iranian coalition should be limited to safety-oriented mission de-confliction.
For President Obama, playing by “Putin/Suleimani rules” won’t be easy, but it may be just what it takes to restore a sense of balance and proportion to our Middle East policy and counter the very real Russian-Iranian threats to our allies and interests.
**Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute. James Jeffrey is the Institute’s Philip Solondz Distinguished Fellow.
