Posts Tagged ‘Bashar Assad’

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So What The Hell Is Going On in Syria?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2015

The problem with doing an update on Syria is that I’m not sure anyone knows what the hell is going on there.

The motivations of the major local players are clear: Assad wants to survive and maintain power, while his paymasters in Iran want to back him and the Shia against the Islamic State and other Sunni groups. The Islamic State wants to establish its brutal medieval caliphate over first Mesopotamia and the Levant, then the entire Ummah, then the entire world, exterminating Shia and subjugating Christians and Jews to dhimmitude along the way. The Saudis want to back Sunnis (possibly including the Islamic State). The Kurds just want to survive. Etc.

However, what Barack Obama and Vladamir Putin want is considerably less clear.

Obama, after royally screwing Iraq by pulling U.S. troops out after Bush had largely stabilized it (at great expense in money and lives), seems to want to fight a pretend air war against the Islamic State and a pretend insurgency against Assad in order to keep reporters from asking him about it, thus kicking the can down the road for the next President to deal with. (Then again, perhaps this gives Obama too much credit. Maybe, like Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to give the Falklands back, Obama screwed up Iraq just for the pure leftish joy of undoing the achievements of a conservative leader he loathed…)

What does Putin want to accomplish in Syria? Prop up a military equipment-buying client state in Syria? Support a more important client state in Iran? Give Obama a black eye? Keep Russians distracted from domestic economic woes with military adventurism abroad? Make Russia the dominate political power in the Middle East, filling the vacuum Obama left with America’s withdrawal and betrayal of regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia? Actually destroy the Islamic State? Take the Shia side in a the wider Sunni-Shia conflict?

Here are some links on Syria:

  • Zero Hedge sees the beginnings of a regional war.

    If Russia ends up bolstering Iran’s position in Syria (by expanding Hezbollah’s influence and capabilities) and if the Russian air force effectively takes control of Iraq thus allowing Iran to exert a greater influence over the government in Baghdad, the fragile balance of power that has existed in the region will be turned on its head and in the event this plays out, one should not expect Washington, Riyadh, Jerusalem, and London to simply go gentle into that good night.

    Sure enough, some experts now predict Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey will move to counter Russia militarily if Moscow continues to rack up gains for Assad.

  • Andrew McCarthy comes out against U.S. intervention:

    The Syrian mess has gotten messier because Vladimir Putin, with all the unpredictability of the morning sun, has invaded Syria on behalf of Assad and Putin’s more important ally Iran — Assad’s longtime string-puller. The Russian strongman’s claimed purpose is to fight the Islamic State — a pretext no more real than was the supposed need to protect indigenous Russian populations that Putin cited in invading Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine.

    Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.

  • Disclaimer: Newsweek.

    The move provides a foothold in a part of the world that the Soviet Union was kicked out of four decades ago. At a moment when the United States appears to be washing its hands of the increasingly bloody and chaotic region, it gives Russia an expanding military presence in the Mediterranean on the doorstep of a NATO ally (its newly established airfield at Latakia in eastern Syria sits just 75 miles from the border with Turkey), and the gambit may yet serve as leverage with the West as Putin seeks to get out from under economic sanctions imposed as a result of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine.

  • Vladimir S. Patton.
  • “Putin’s policy is ugly — Russian airstrikes produced immediate reports of civilian casualties — but effective for its purpose. Obama’s policy is high-minded and prudent, but it has been painfully ineffective.”
  • And there are already reports that Russian planes have already violated Turkey’s airspace. And remember that Turkey is still a member of NATO…
  • “The pathetic failure of the Pentagon’s efforts in Syria indicate that if anything, this culture of self-congratulation and failure [in Obama’s Department of Defense] is getting more entrenched.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    • The problem for America is that a logical Middle East policy is impossible as long as Obama is President and Kerry is Secretary of State.

    Can Putin achieve long-term victory in Syria where Obama’s fecklessness couldn’t? Maybe. Can Iran and Russia together crush the Islamic State? If Russia wanted to commit serious ground combat forces (think Operation Iraqi Freedom), probably, but that would be an exceptionally expensive move that would spread Russian forces dangerously thin elsewhere. But considering that does not appear to be Russia’s immediate goal, which seems to be crushing the Free Syrian Army and allied forces in Western Syria, expect the war against the Islamic State to drag out indefinitely.

    Except for the Kurds (which Obama’s feckless policies have refused to adequately support), the Syrian Civil War is bad guys vs. bad guys all the way down. Assad surviving, or a long-running war between Russia and the Islamic State, are far from the worst possible outcomes…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 2 Comments »

    $500 Million for 54 Syrian Rebels?

    Saturday, September 19th, 2015

    Anyone paying attention has long known what a miserable failure Obama’s Syrian strategy (such as it is) against Bashar Assad has been. But only recently has it come to light just how ridiculously expensive that miserable failure has been:

    The aim was to identify reasonably secular moderate fighters in Syria, transfer them to third-party countries in the region, train them, equip them, and reintroduce them into the theater of operations. By August of this year and $500 million later, the Pentagon acknowledged that only 54 Syrian rebels had been prepared for combat. Less than a month later, almost all of them had been killed or captured.

    $500 Million for 54 guys? What were they, hand-crafted artisanal rebels? Where did the money go? Did they hire Damien Hirst to make each of their 54 uniforms? Did each of the 54 make a $1 million donation to the Clinton Foundation? Even by the pathetic standards of the Obama Administration that’s a ridiculous amount of graft, fraud and waste. You could easily have trained and equipped an effective mercenary brigade for that much money.

    There were actual reasons to support the removal of Assad early in the Obama Administration, but the rise of the Islamic State rendered most of them obsolete. Now that Obama and Kerry have rolled over to let Assad’s paymasters in Tehran rub their furry bellies, there’s no point in pretending to equip opposition fighters beyond Obama’s desire to keep up the facade of a Syrian policy as a sop to his wounded vanity.

    Since Obama can’t topple Assad and is singularly unwilling to fight a real war against the Islamic State, at this point we should probably just let Iran, Syria and Russia try their hands at crushing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s barbaric caliphate. A long, grinding Sunni-Shia civil war in Mesopotamia is probably among the least bad outcomes available for the region after Obama’s serial bungling…

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.)

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    Why Did Obama Back Jihadists in Syria?

    Monday, August 10th, 2015

    This piece in Foreign Policy Journal is certainly eye-opening:

    In Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was “a willful decision.” [Lengthy discussion of the DIA memo begins at the 8:50 mark.]

    Amazingly, Flynn actually took issue with the way interviewer Mehdi Hasan posed the question—Flynn seemed to want to make it clear that the policies that led to the rise of ISIL were not merely the result of ignorance or looking the other way, but the result of conscious decision making:

    Hasan: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?

    Flynn: I think the administration.

    Hasan: So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?

    Flynn: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.

    Hasan: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?

    Flynn: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.

    The deeply puzzling thing about Obama’s Middle East policy is it’s sheer incoherence (except, of course, his unwavering dislike of Israel). His fixation on taking out Bashar Assad (a bad actor, to be sure, but not in the same league as the Iranian Mullahs who back Assad, and who Obama evidently has no qualms negotiating with) makes no strategic sense. In light of the above, he’s evidently funding the Islamic State in Syria, fighting it (in the most desultory manner possible) in Iraq, giving in to Iran on nuclear weapons, alienating allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, and has no discernible policy for a post-Morsi Egypt. Obama’s moves only make sense if he wants to promote a Sunni/Shia civil war, or as Obama’s personal fits of pique where he feels slighted. (Screw Syria for ignoring his red lines. Screw Israel for daring to reelect Netanyahu. Screw Iraq for Bush succeeding.)

    The only certainty about Obama’s foreign policy is that future administrations will be dealing with the repercussions from his feckless, aimless foreign policy for decades to come.

    (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)

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    Iraq/Syria/ISIS Update

    Thursday, June 26th, 2014

    Since Iraq and Syria are now all part of the same greater Sunni/Shia conflict, let’s take a look at recent developments in the broader theater:

    The War Nerd pinpoints the biggest reason for ISIS’s rapid Iraq advance: the flat geography of the area they’ve taken: “It’s the Bonneville Salt Flats of insurgency, the place you go to set new speed records.” He also thinks the Kurdish Pesh Merga will slaughter them if ISIS is foolish enough to make a big push into the northern hill country.

    Michael Totten has a depressing interview with Lee Smith, the author of The Consequences of Syria:

  • For all Obama’s talk of arming Syrian rebels, no arms seem to have actually made it there. Indeed, the whole thing seems to have been a disinformation campaign the press lapped up. “This White House has been bad for the press, and the readership’s faith in our press, but it seems most journalists don’t much care.”
  • “The administration feared that helping topple Assad, an ally of Iran, might have angered the Iranians and pushed them away from the negotiating table, and getting a deal with Iran was the White House’s chief goal in the Middle East.” So the goal of the Obama Administration isn’t a free Middle East, or a stable Middle East, but signing a piece of paper with the ayatollahs.
  • Since Obama’s serial retreats have put us in a situation of such profound weakness, they won’t even be getting that: “What we’re seeing [is] a United States in retreat in the Middle East. So I don’t see what the accommodation would look like. It’s not a grand bargain with Iran, but an American fire sale, with the US virtually giving away its assets. The US is retreating from the region and leaving it in Iranian hands.”
  • “What we’re seeing in cities like Mosul is a Sunni rebellion against Maliki and the Iranians. In addition to ISIS, there are also former Baath party figures, like one of Saddam’s deputies, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, as well as Sunni tribes. ISIS would appear to be playing the role of Sunni shock troops, who are dispatched to the fronts to terrorize and create havoc. Behind them are the Baathis and the tribes.”
  • Reason for ISIS’ rapid advance? Maliki’s brutal sectarian incompetence. “What Maliki and the Iranians have done is unite the tribes and ISIS through their anti-Sunni policies.”

    • Read the whole thing.

    A look a Syria’s Christians, who are getting it from both sides.

    Here’s a piece that suggests that moderate Sunnis are just using ISIS to get Maliki out. (Well, what are a few Shia mass graves anyway?) Yeah, not buying it. It’s the guys with guns who use “moderates,” not the other way around. Also argues for a de jour rather than merely de facto partition of Iraq.

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    Iraq: It’s All George W. Bush’s Fault

    Thursday, June 12th, 2014

    (Note: This headline is only slightly factitious.)

    The problem with George W. Bush’s Middle East policy is that there’s no political gain there, no matter how great the price or resounding the achievement, that Obama can’t throw away through his manifestly gross incompetence. Al Qaeda in Iraq’s successor organization, the Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) “consolidated and extended their control over northern Iraq on Wednesday, seizing Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, threatening the strategic oil refining town of Baiji and pushing south toward Baghdad, their ultimate target.”

    That’s the same ISIS that captured Mosul, where they seized $429 million worth of Iraqi dinars from the local bank, making them the richest terrorist army in the world.

    Remember when Obama declared that “al Qaeda is on the run”?

    And remember when Obama pulled out of Iraq and walked away without a status of forces agreement there?

    Now two battalions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds forces have deployed to Iraq, ostensibly to support Maliki’s Shiite government. So now, in theory, we’re allied with the Mullahs in Iran in Iraq against the Isalmists we’re supporting in Syria against the Iran-aligned government of Bashar Assad.

    About the only good news out of the region is that the Kurds are holding their own. An independent Kurdistan would be far from the worst development in the region, and would probably freak out both Iran and Turkey enough to distract them from further mischief elsewhere.

    The current situation highlights the age-old truth that the Middle East is filled with people whose deepest desire appears to be to kill and gain power over members of rival clans/tribes/factions/confessions/etc. This has been true for pretty much all of recorded history save when a strong power (Ottoman, British, Baathist) is able to keep those tendencies in check through heavy policing, military occupation, or a brutal security state apparatus. The presence of our troops there gives the natives a distraction and a target, allowing them to temporarily stop killing each other in preference to killing us. The exceptions to this rule, such as multicultural Lebanon circa 1946-1974, have proven frustratingly ephemeral.

    Israel provided a temporary target of unifying hatred, but the Jewish state’s defensive measures have made it increasingly difficult to get close enough to any Jews to kill them, hence back to the old internecine pursuits.

    Bush43’s foreign policy in the Middle East and the decision to invade Iraq stems, in large measure, from Bush41’s decision not to let Schwartzkopf take Baghdad in The Gulf War. Whether doing so would have brought all on all our Iraqi troubles two decades earlier is debatable. There is much to say for toppling a totalitarian thug like Saddam, not least of which was liberating the children’s prison, where children as young as 5 were tortured to make their mothers talk. Perhaps the ideal strategy would have been to depose and execute Saddam and his top regime supporters in 1991, then immediately leave and let Iraqi factions kill each other rather than our troops. But I doubt anyone put forward that idea as a serious suggestion at the time.

    Bush43 ultimately succeeded in largely pacifying Iraq, but the cost was high and, as recent events proved, the gains were temporary. The problem with interventionist policy in the Middle East is that there is no gain safe from the feckless impulses of surrender and appeasement that dominate the Democratic Party’s thinking today. The Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party is dead, and Obama and Kerry perfectly embody the combination of naivete, hubris, multilateralist, and hostility to the military that dominates today. They love signing treaties and “the peace process,” even though it’s all process and no peace.

    It turns out that Ron Paul may be right for the wrong reasons. Because no foreign policy gain in the Middle East is safe from Democratic incompetence, Republicans should not pursue any interventionist foreign policy there, especially in the name of impossible “stability”. No interventionist accomplishment there can endure long past the end of a Republican President’s term, because there is no gain safe from the likes of Kerry and Obama. And since there is no indication the nature of the Democratic Party will be changing any time soon, a military interventionist foreign policy there, no matter how well-intentioned, well-planned, and well-executed, must be doomed to ultimate failure.

    In hindsight, the liberation of Iraq turns out to be a tragic mistake, because Bush underestimated how decisively his hard-won gains could be undone by the incompetence of his successor.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military, Obama Scandals | 1 Comment »

    A Quick LinkSwarm on Syria

    Monday, June 17th, 2013

    So Obama is (maybe) going to be shipping arms to Syrian rebels. I think this is a remarkably bad idea for a number of reasons, none of them that Bashar Assad isn’t a murderous thug who oppresses his own people, supports terrorism, and attacks and destabilizes neighbors like Lebanon and Israel. All that is true, and Assad certainly deserves a bullet in his head for his sins.

    But there’s zero compelling evidence that toppling him is in the United State’s best interests, that America has any vital interests at sake in the Syrian civil war, or that al Qaeda-related Islamslist thugs won’t come out on top, impose Sharia law, and export Sunni-branded terrorism every bit as vicious and deadly as Assad’s Shia-backed variety. Indeed, the history of Libya and Egypt suggests that they are likely to be considerably worse. And predicting that Sunni Islamists are likely to come out on top of a post-Assad power struggle is like predicting that guys are going to wake up with no memory of last night in a Hangover sequel: we’ve seen this movie before.

    Anyway, here are a few links for the current situation in Syria.

  • Who makes up the opposition to Assad in Syria? “An array of rebel militias heavily infiltrated by radical Islamists and al Qaida loyalists with no central command.” In other words: exactly who those of us paying attention have said they are.
  • Victor Davis Hanson makes the case that intervention in Syria is a bad idea. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
  • Michael Totten can’t make heads or tails of Obama’s plans for Syria…including whether we’re actually arming the rebels or not.
  • Speaking of Totten, he links to this piece that argues. “The Islamic Republic[of Iran]’s headlong intervention in Syria is akin to Nazi Germany’s surge of military forces into the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 – an operationally competent, strategic blunder of epic proportions.” Not buying it, especially the part that says “Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ultimate defeat is a foregone conclusion.” His argument of Irnaian-backed losses being unsustainable also sounds remarkably like the “flypaper strategy” some said would kill off the supply of radical Islamists by drawing them to the insurgency and killing them in Iraq, and we all know how well that theory turned out…

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    Syrian Headlines One Year From Now

    Friday, June 14th, 2013

    New Syrian President Greets American Ambassador

    “A New Era”

    Syria Pledges Cooperation in Iraq, Lebanon

    Israel Claims New Syrian Government Shipping Arms to Hamas

    Damascus Under Sharia
    “They beat my wife,” claims distraught shopkeeper

    Syrian chemical weapons missing?

    Sunni, Shia Clashes in Lebanon Intensify

    They’re Back: How Hezbollah Survived the Fall of Assad

    New Round of Rocket Attacks Hit Tel Aviv, 2 Dead

    Iran Withdraws From Nuclear Weapon Talks

    American Solider Missing in Damascus
    Syrian government pledges “full cooperation”

    Hostage Video Released for Kidnapped Smith

    Mother issues tearful plea for Smith’s return

    Sunni Mosque Bombed in Karbala
    Iraqis blame Iran

    Alawite Insurgency Flares Again

    Syrian military talks end without agreement

    Clashes in Lebanon Spread, 31 Dead

    Syria Denies Involvement in Preschool Bombing

    Egyptian-Syrian Cooperation Pact Signed

    KLM 411 Flight Kuwait Missing

    KLM 411 Wreckage Found in Dessert

    Investigators Say KLM 411 Shot Down
    Iraq Denies Its Planes Were in Area

    Al-Qaeda Claims Responsibility for KLM 411
    “This is only the beginning.”

    Syrian Government Denies Supplying MANPADS to Al-Qaeda

    Jerusalem Hospital Bombed
    18 dead, more feared in wreckage

    IDF Invades Gaza
    Fierce Fighting
    First Large Incursion Since 2012

    More Lebanese Rockets Hit Tel Aviv

    UN Calls for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza

    Israel Displays Cache of Hamas Weapons, Claims Syrian Origin

    Syria Denies Shipping Weapons to Hamas
    “More lies from the criminal Zionist entity”

    Six months after kidnapping, few leads on Pvt. Smith
    Mother: “I pray every night.”

    U.S Embassy in Damascus Overrun; Ambassador, 12 Others Feared Dead

    Obama: Embassy overrun by protesters of anti-Islamic cartoon

    Lebanese Civil War Heating Up Again

    (Related.)

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    Syrian Rebels On Outskirts of Damascus

    Monday, January 30th, 2012

    What the headlines says, although they were repulsed.

    If President Hamlet was thinking about helping topple Assad, now would be a Real Good Time to jump off the fence.

    Plus, unlike Libya and Egypt, not only would it be very hard for the next government to be worse than the current one. Plus it would be a blow to Iran and Hezbollah, and thus would dramatically improve the possibility of real peace and a stable government in Lebanon.

    (Hat tip: Michael Totten)

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    France Recognizes Syrian Rebels

    Thursday, November 24th, 2011

    “In a direct echo of previous events in Libya, France has formally recoginsed the opposition Syrian National Council and proposed that international troops should protect civilians.”

    Meanwhile, those rebels are calling for international air strikes against the Assad regime.

    It’s quite possible that the Assad regime could unravel much faster than Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya did, since whole army units have already defected, and Assad is much more isolated from his country’s Sunni majority that Gadhafi was (at least ethnically) from his.

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    France Pushing Intervention in Syria?

    Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

    So it seems:

    Alain Juppe, France’s foreign minister, has raised the possibility that western powers could intervene directly intervene [sic – LP] to protect civilians in Syria from the Assad regime.

    He suggested that “humanitarian corridors or humanitarian zones” could be established to protect those under attack.

    As the Assad regime presses ahead with its attacks on Syrian rebels, Mr Juppé has become the first senior western figure to raise the possibility of such an intervention. He said the issue would be discussed by European Union foreign ministers at a meeting next month.

    Of course he goes on to say that “full scale military intervention by the west in Syria was not being considered.” But I remember hearing much the same thing about the intervention in Libya, and we all know how that turned out.

    France’s sudden belligerence may seem out-of-character, but they’ve been pissed at Assad ever since he had Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated in 2005. France has a long history of ties with Lebanon, and the Hariri assassination was just the most overt act in Syria’s semi-successful attempt to turn Lebanon into a puppet state. I have no doubt that France would be happy to knock off Assad if they were sure they had NATO (or at least American and UK) backing and could be sure the job was done right.

    In other news, UNSECO’s executive board unanimously elected Syria to a committee dealing with human rights—even though the U.S. has a representative on the committee. Must be more of that Obama Administration “smart diplomacy” we keep hearing about…

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