US President Barack Obama told Pentagon and military chiefs he met Friday, Oct. on Oct. 14, that instead of arming anti-Assad rebel groups in Syria, Washington was going back to negotiations with Moscow for cooperation in achieving a cessation of hostilities in the Syrian war.
US Secretary of State John Kerry therefore scheduled his umpteenth meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for Saturday in Lausanne. This time, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and possibly Qatar, tagged along.
Beyond the high words, recriminations and the unspeakable horrors attending the battle for Aleppo, Obama never seriously considered providing the anti-Syrian rebels holed up in Aleppo with the anti-air weapons they need to shoot down the Russian and Syrian warplanes blitzing them – any more than UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s statement that it was time for British military involvement in the Syrian war was for real.
Above all, Britain is short of the military heft for backing up hypothetical intentions.
The options for serious Western intervention in the Syrian war are constantly diminishing for the reasons outlined here by DEBKAfile’s military sources:
1. American missiles have no way of reaching Syrian rebel groups, certainly not those still fighting in eastern Aleppo. Neither Russia, nor Turkey, whose army now controls 5,000 sq. km of northern Syria, would let them through to that destination.
2. Had Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan chosen to do so, he could have simply ordered his army to open up a route for the supply of missiles to the rebels who are hemmed in in Aleppo by Russia, Syrian, Iranian and Hizballah forces. He is withholding that order because the military deals he concluded with President Vladimir Putin last week in Istanbul override any concerns he may have for the fate of those rebels or Aleppo’s population.
3. Those deals in a word sanctify the Turkish “security zone” in northern Syria which is covered by a no-fly zone for all but Russian and Turkish flights. They also provide for the Syrian rebels retreating from the various Syrian war zones, including Aleppo, to be taken in and absorbed in the Turkish enclave. Erdogan would thus become the senior patron of the Syrian opposition rebel movement, barring only the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and other Islamic extremist groups. This would enable him to steal from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar their sponsorship roles and their influence in the anti-Assad movement.
4. Ankara’s military alliance with Moscow is steadily eroding Turkey’s ties with the United States as well as NATO. Matters have gone so far that the two capitals or in advanced discussion of the supply of Russian air defense missiles to the Turkish army.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources reveal that under discussion is the installation in Turkey of a system of advanced Russian missiles linked to the Russian anti-air missile shield under construction in Syria.
Turkey would thus become the first member of NATO to arm itself with a Russian anti-air missile shield.
How was this allowed to happen?
According to our sources, Putin and Erdogan are moving fast to cash in on President Obama’s repugnance for military intervention in Syria and his waning powers at the tail end of his presidency.
Furthermore –
a) Neither is configuring Syrian President Bashar Assad into their calculations. They are going forward with their plans while ignoring him and his drastically diminished army as factors worth consideration.
b) Their objectives are similar and interlocking: Both are intent on developing their respective enclaves in northern Syria, Moscow for a long-term military presence in the country: likewise, Ankara.
Up until now, the Obama administration stood firm against the two goals, which is why Washington and Moscow were unable to achieve any real cooperation over a secession of hostilities in the war-torn country; even when Kerry and Lavrov struck a truce accord on Sept 9, it never held up beyond a few hours.
Most recently, Putin and Erdogan tried signaling the US president that their sole ambitions with regard to Syria’s future lie in the two military enclaves now under construction.
Obama saw this as a sufficient basis to continue withholding advanced arms from Syrian rebel groups and to go for another round of diplomacy with Russia – with Turkey hitching a ride this time on the opposite side of the table..
At the rate this is going, in five or six years, Israel (by which I mean the modern state of Israel, going back to 1948) may be one of the oldest countries in the world! Hmmmmm.
@ bernard ross:
From the terrific article you quoted: “Alex Tenzer, an expert on Russian-Israeli relations, told Haaretz that the reinforcement of Russian forces in Syria and particularly the stationing of the S-300 missiles is part of a Russian battle against the United States, and not against Israel.”
I had a funny thought. Hegel said, “History repeats itself.” Marx, who began as a left-wing Hegelian, modified it to: “Yes, but the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
In 1948, during the War of Independence*, before the decades of Soviet-Inspired “Palestinian” nonsense, Russia (at that time, the Soviet Union) was the only country (other than Czechoslovakia (which no longer exists; it is now the Czech and Slovak Republics, two separate countries)), which provided land for an air-base) that provided any aid at all to besieged Israel while the United States slapped an embargo on the entire region (the British were supporting the Arabs so that meant Israel) and punished any American Jews they caught trying to help for violating the Neutrality act. Also, Stalin made an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the war, to form a common front against the Nazis (Putin is an ex- KGB agent.) I presume I don’t have to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s here, for you to see the humor of this present situation.
*(As an ex-Stalinist, I have to keep catching myself from saying things like Israel’s “Great Patriotic War of Independence for the Glorious Zionist Motherland – you know, the “Jews Paradise.” just kidding.)
@ bernard ross:
Yes, I don’t believe Russia poses a threat to Israel. Putin is a philo-semite. He has done a great deal to combat anti-semitism in Russia and extend a hand to Israel. I believe that whatever assistance he has given Iran is simply Russia’s traditional bolstering of it’s borders, indirectly. It doesn’t want any neighboring country invaded. Also, it’s a two-edged sword because by making Iran somewhat dependant for certain kinds of aid, it has been able to limit Iran somewhat, in the same way that Obama used Israel’s dependence for certain weaponry to hamper Israel during the Gaza war.
While turning a blind eye to the horrific repression of the regimes and movements they support, the U.S. and E.U. go on and on about Putin’s so-called repression, trying to whip up the masses into a fury. Well, I googled it and all I found was repression of Islamists and their lawyers, plus international Leftist hooligans like the Lesbian Punk Rock group, “Pussy Riot” that got two years for hooliganism because they hijacked a Russian Orthodox Church service, took over the cathedral and proceeded to desecrate everything that community believed in with obscenity and a call to oust the President of the country.
You can argue that two years was a lot but not that it was peaceful exercise of the right to petition the government to redress grievances or peaceable assembly. Of course, it was hooliganism, and Putin is nipping it in the bud before it tears the country apart like it has here.
In France, until 2013, it was a crime to insult the President until 2013, and it is still a crime to defame public officials. Shall we go to war with France? Name me a Muslim country, that doesn’t routinely behave worse — if that’s possible — than the Spanish Inquisition. Other than Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which have good relations with Israel, and get the same kind of criticism from the hypocrite left, selectively turning their hysterical outrage on and off like a faucet, as tactics dictate according to their leaders (your average Progressive doesn’t really think.)
Russia wants to fight Isis. Turkey wants to fight Isis and the Kurds. The U.S. under Obama doesn’t know what it wants. One minute it’s supporting the anti-Assad rebels who include our worst jihadist enemies, the next it is leaving it to Putin to fight those same enemies. From lines in the sand that amount to nothing to ambivalently switching sides. Taking out hospitals and wedding parties with drones by mistake because we have no eyes and ears on the ground and then accusing Russia of human rights violations, and behaving as though Jews building or extending homes in existing communities and buying land from willing Arab sellers for above market price is a human rights violation and impediment to peace, while turning a blind eye to the P.A. and Hamas’, Iran and Turkey’s human rights violations. The Obama Administration’s foreign policy is confused and incoherent at best. At worst, the Obama Administration’s policy objectively follows the same consistent pattern of weakening America’s position in arena after arena. It’s like a reversal of that old punchline, “is it good for the Jews?” The Left (and the Jihadists it is allied with) whose creature Obama is wants only to know, “Is it bad for Israel, America, and the West?”