US Refusal to Cooperate with Russia Prolonged Syrian Suffering, by Danielle Ryan
"...Turkey’s latest gamble — firing across its border at
the Syrian Kurdish YPG — has exposed the true absurdity of Washington’s
actions in Syria. Here we have the American-backed Kurds fighting
American-backed jihadists all the while being shelled by American-backed
NATO member, Turkey. You could not make it up if you tried. This is an
almost incomprehensible state of affairs — and incredibly dangerous. If
Turkey, emboldened further by Washington’s tacit or explicit approval,
steps up its campaign against the Kurds in Syria, potentially even going
so far as a ground invasion with Saudi Arabia — there is no telling
where this conflict will end. Such an action would lead NATO state
Turkey into direct military confrontation with Russia inside Syria.
Then, all bets are off...."
Earlier this month, an American tourist
in Iceland tapped the wrong address into his car’s GPS system and
instead of driving to his hotel in Reykjavik, he drove from one side of
the country to the other — without noticing he was going in the wrong
direction. Indeed, all the signposts were telling him that his real
destination was somewhere back the other way, but he ignored them, kept
on driving — and ultimately ended up somewhere that he had never
intended on going. That may now be where the United States is headed;
not to a remote town in Iceland, but to a confrontation between NATO and
Russia over its refusal to read the signposts and turn back before it
was too late. The list of things the Obama administration failed to
anticipate about the Syria crisis is not short. First, they failed to
see how difficult it would be to break the Syrian Arab Army,
consistently and wrongly assuming that their ultimate goal — the
toppling of Bashar al-Assad — was just around the corner. Next, they
failed to see how serious Russia was about keeping the Syrian state
intact and were thrown for a loop when Moscow intervened in the
conflict, derailing long-held plans for regime change. Then, they failed
to see how turning a blind eye to Turkey’s motivations on the Syrian
border would bring not only various US-backed groups into direct
confrontation with each other, but would actually create the conditions
for a direct confrontation between Russia and a NATO member state. Obama
clung to the mantra ‘Assad must go’ while the house was burning down,
and in doing so, prolonged the suffering of the Syrian people. After
backing radical Islamist groups and illegally bombing the country for
more than a year to no avail, his administration steadfastly refused to
cooperate fully with Russia to solve the crisis. Instead, it partnered
with states like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both of which are inarguably
interested in the total collapse of the Syrian government — an event
which would plunge the country into even deeper chaos, destroying the
secularism that held it together and ultimately paving the way for an
Islamist regime to take control.
Institutional hatred of Russia prolonged Syrians’ suffering
It’s not that there weren’t plenty of
opportunities when the US could have changed course. Military men,
academics, historians, journalists — even the CIA, according to some
reports — were warning the White House it was on the wrong track,
fighting a losing battle — and yet the administration stuck with a
policy which may have done more to benefit radical Islamists than anyone
else. Why? Ask the State Department and they’ll tell you they are on a
humanitarian mission to save the Syrian people from Assad, that his
government has lost legitimacy, that until he goes there can be no
peace, that the so-called “moderate” opposition groups must be part of a
solution — and so on. That all sounds lovely, but here’s another
theory: Maybe it’s just never okay to be on the same side as Russia.
Could that be why the US refused to change tack in the face of so much
empirical evidence that their strategy was not working? Is there some
element to this that is simply about saving face?
Washington’s historic
hatred of Russia has meant that from the very beginning of its
intervention in Syria, there was nothing Moscow could do that the US
would accept. It was simply inconceivable that Russia could be labelled
anything other than a dangerous irritant. This narrative was important
to maintain, particularly given that the State Department had spent the
two years prior demonizing Moscow and drilling away at any semblance of a
working relationship that remained between the two powers. Such
behaviour has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is Washington
stuck in a Cold War mindset, not Moscow. When Russia asked for an
international coalition to fight ISIS, Washington didn’t want to know.
Even after the Paris attacks last November, when European rhetoric
softened on Assad, still the White House prioritized information war
against Moscow over solutions to the crisis. For Washington, it was more
important to prove that Russian bombing was ‘exacerbating’ the refugee
crisis and that Russia was ‘not really’ fighting terrorists than it was
to critically reevaluate US strategy. The White House was so reluctant
to budge, that according to one bombshell report by veteran reporter
Seymour Hersh, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — believing that the
administration was fixated on Vladimir Putin and “captive to Cold War
thinking” — actually went behind Obama’s back to provide Assad
with intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel, which would help him
push back ISIS and Al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda.
Where are we now?
While the US has backed itself into a
corner, Russia’s strategy has remained consistent and borne fruit. It is
Moscow’s intervention that has been decisive and “irreversibly changed”
the military dynamic, causing both ISIS and other jihadist groups to
lose ground. With Russia’s aid, the Syrian Arab Army has proved itself
to be the only fighting force on the ground or otherwise that can defeat
ISIS. The problem is, that if the US was ever serious about defeating
ISIS, it must now be realizing that it partnered with players who were
less concerned by head-chopping terrorists and more concerned with own
their regional interests — some of which just so happen to coincide with
ISIS interests. Turkey’s latest gamble — firing across its border at
the Syrian Kurdish YPG — has exposed the true absurdity of Washington’s
actions in Syria. Here we have the American-backed Kurds fighting
American-backed jihadists all the while being shelled by American-backed
NATO member, Turkey. You could not make it up if you tried. This is an
almost incomprehensible state of affairs — and incredibly dangerous. If
Turkey, emboldened further by Washington’s tacit or explicit approval,
steps up its campaign against the Kurds in Syria, potentially even going
so far as a ground invasion with Saudi Arabia — there is no telling
where this conflict will end. Such an action would lead NATO state
Turkey into direct military confrontation with Russia inside Syria.
Then, all bets are off.
Malevolence or incompetence?
There are generally two competing
opinions among the harsher critics of US foreign policy. The first, is
that Washington has knowingly and deliberately tried to destabilize the
Middle East over the course of decades, that its motives are almost
entirely malevolent. The second, argues that the various crises in which
the US finds itself entangled are the result of foreign policy and
diplomatic incompetence — a “loss of strategic direction,” as Sergei
Karaganov, former foreign policy advisor to Putin has politely put it.
Of course, it’s nearly impossible to decipher which side is right and
which is wrong — in reality, it’s probably a bit of both, depending on
which administration you are dealing with — but watching Obama’s White
House as it tries to haplessly scramble to maintain some semblance of
control over the Syria crisis, it would be hard to believe that the
world has been dragged to this dangerous precipice by some cunning
Machiavellian strategist.
Danielle Ryan is an international
journalist of the Irish origin that has been covering a wide range of
topics over the years, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”