Syria, Putin, Obama

An old article i read today.

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Oct 6, 2015 10:59 PM EST
Thomas Friedman, read your Chomsky: The New York Times gets Putin/Obama all wrong, again
“Do you realize now what you’ve done?” The best question about our Middle East disasters actually comes from Putin

Patrick L. Smith

Syria/Putin/Obama:http://www.salon.com/2015/10/06/thomas_friedman_read_your_chomsky_the_new_york_times_gets_putinobama_all_wrong_again/

see link
“…..There are four things to say about this account straight off the top. One, the subtext is that Putin reached the point in New York when he effectively threw up his hands and said, “I’m fed up.” Two, Obama went into that meeting more or less befuddled as to what to say. In a word, he was outclassed.

Three, the strategy Putin presented to Obama is clear, logical, lawful and has a good chance of working. In other words, it is everything the Obama administration’s is not, Kerry’s efforts to work with Lavrov notwithstanding.

Four and most important, the history books may well conclude that the U.N. on Sept. 27 was the very place and the very day the U.S. ceded the initiative to Russia on the Syria crisis. This is my read as of now, although in circumstances this kinetic it is too perilous to anticipate what may come next.

The American press has been slightly berserk subsequent to the U.N. encounter, putting more spin on the new Russian policy than a gyroscope has in space. Putin is weak and desperate, he is making Syria more violent, Russian jets are bombing CIA-backed “moderates” and not ISIS, this is Russia’s second Afghanistan, nothing can work so long as Assad remains in power.

“Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power,” Tom Friedman, a standout in this line, wrote in the Times last week. “Watch him become public enemy No. 1 in the Sunni Muslim world. ‘Yo, Vladimir, how’s that working for you?’”

I read all this with a mirror: It is nothing more than a reflection of how far below its knees the Obama administration’s pants have just fallen. Who went stupidly into Syria, Tom? Yo, Tom, your lump-them-together prejudices are showing: Most of “the Sunni Muslim world” is as appalled by the Islamic State as the non-Sunni Muslim world.

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What a weird sensation it is to agree with Charles Krauthammer, one of the Washington’s Post’s too-numerous right-wing opinion-page writers. It is like traveling in a strange, badly run country where something always seems about to go wrong.

“If it had the wit, the Obama administration would be not angered, but appropriately humiliated,” Krauthammer wrote in last Thursday’s paper. “President Obama has, once again, been totally outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin.”

It is a lot better than Tom Friedman’s driveling defense of the president. Somewhere, at least, a spade is still a spade. But with this observation the common ground with Krauthammer begins and ends. Obama has got it radically wrong in Syria—and indeed across the Middle East—but not in the ways we are encouraged to think. Where lie the errors, then?

The first and biggest of them is his willingness to inherit the vision bequeathed by 117 years of American ambition abroad. In the American imperium it is all about us, always. Syria is not Syria, a land of 23 million people (before the exodus we prompted) just as Egypt as it aspired to democracy during the Arab Spring was not Egypt. These are squares on the geopolitical game board. In the Syria case, Russia has a strategy that is prima facie rational and right, but we must object because it is Russia’s. Certainly we cannot join Moscow to make common cause.

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Putin and Zarif and others now posing questions are telling Washington something it will have to hear if it is to get off the destructive course of American foreign policy: This is not about you, as many things in the world are not. This is about a political, social and cultural crisis that requires the disinterested attention of those capable of contributing to a solution.

Think about the united front Putin proposes and Obama declines to join. It is already in motion, in case you did not notice. Moscow, Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus are all now committed to cooperating—not least by way of intelligence sharing, which is a big one—in the fight to subdue the Islamic State.

But isn’t it true that Russia is bombing targets other than the Islamic State, some of which are rebel groups the CIA has backed? Possibly, although I have not taken the Pentagon’s word for anything since 1966 or so. In my read Russian jets are probably hitting those groups most immediately threatening Damascus—no surprise, given the stated mission is to keep Assad in the presidential palace until the fighting stops. Why, in any case, should Russia discriminate between one rebel group and another, when “moderate opposition” is nothing but a fantasy out of the Reaganists’ old “freedom fighter” narrative?

But isn’t Putin about to reclaim influence in the Middle East that the Soviet Union lost long ago? This may be, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: Putin sees the Syria crisis spinning out of control and wants it resolved before it spreads just as the Kremlin now fears. In my read, reclaimed influence in the region will be a follow-on consequence. To the extent it materializes, we will have to get used to calling it multipolarity. If you think the record of American primacy in the Middle East is something worth preserving at the exorbitant cost it exacts, please use the comment box and enlighten all of us.

Obama’s second big mistake has to do with his response to the problem of American exceptionalism. One had a sense late during his first term and into his second that he understood it was time to lance this boil on the American consciousness, but in the breach he seems to have demurred.

The result has been his commitment to keep American troops out of conflict zones but to maintain the posture by way of Air Force bombers and supposedly surgical drone attacks. He thus altered only method, not purpose, the desired outcome—as, again, he inherited it. Not only has it failed to achieve any result in Syria; the grotesque bombing of a Médicins sans Frontière hospital in Kanduz, Afghanistan, last weekend reveals the strategy to be a bust on any kind of life-saving, humanitarian grounds, as well.

There is no having your cake and eating it, in short.

We are now going to get earfuls as to how the answer in Syria now is to make greater military commitments, all on our own—Obama’s sin being his gingerly thinking. It is upside down. A good president—and this is why one finds it hard to line up behind Hillary—needs to take on America’s intentions as well as its tactics.

In my read, Russia and Iran have just popped open the door to a solution in Syria. All the pieces are in place but one: Washington’s capacity to acknowledge the strategic failure now so evident and to see beyond the narrowest definition of where its interests lie.

This brings us to the paradox embedded in those questions Putin and Zarif and a few others now pose: American primacy is no longer in America’s interest. Get your mind around this and you have arrived in the 21st century…..see link