Learning From Vladimir: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, Mar. 21, 2016— Vladimir Putin’s splendid little war in Syria did not go off without a hitch.
Putin’s “Sacred Mission” in Syria: Dr. Anna Geifman, BESA, Mar. 27, 2016— On September 30, 2015, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian warplanes into Syria to begin regular aerial bombardments of targets that Moscow defined as sources of “jihadi terror.”
The World is Vladimir Putin’s Stage, But Cracks Appear on the Russian President’s Homefront: Mark MacKinnon, Globe & Mail, Mar. 6, 2016— The news on state television shows Russia advancing on every front.
Stalin, Russia’s New Hero: Alec Luhn, New York Times, Mar. 11, 2016— AT School No. 58 in Penza, a regional capital that is an eight and a half hour drive southeast of Moscow, the jury is still out on Joseph Stalin.
On Topic Links
How Russian Special Forces are Shaping the Fight in Syria: Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Washington Post, Mar. 29, 2016
Israeli Air Force: Russian Air Power in Syria Remains Robust: Barbara Opall-Rome, Defense News, Mar. 28, 2016
Israel’s Alliance That Could Potentially Offset Enhanced Russian and Iranian Power: Leslie Susser, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 26, 2016
Why Putin Wants Syria: Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta, Middle East Forum, Spring, 2016
LEARNING FROM VLADIMIR
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, Mar. 21, 2016
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Vladimir Putin’s splendid little war in Syria did not go off without a hitch. There was the set-to with Turkey; the downed Sukhoi jet. There was international condemnation for bombing civilian targets while sparing ISIS. There were personal frictions between Bashar Assad and Mr. Putin, which might explain the abruptness with which Mr. Putin announced Russia’s departure. Yet it took Mr. Putin just six months to show the world that modest military inputs can decisively tilt the balance of power, and that not every Mideast intervention descends into quagmire. Too bad it was in the service of propping up two dictatorships—Russia’s as well as Syria’s.
Could the next U.S. president learn something from this case study in the use of power? Let’s stipulate that no future president is likely to order aircraft to drop unguided munitions on village marketplaces, as Mr. Putin did in Idlib and Aleppo. Gratuitous cruelty is not the American way of making war in the 21st century, whatever Donald Trump may think. Still, there are some lessons here for future interveners. Like:
1) Take a side. “A prince,” wrote Machiavelli, “is also respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy”—an approach, the Florentine added, that “will always be more advantageous than standing neutral.” In Syria, Mr. Putin took the side of the regime. In previous interventions in Ukraine and Georgia, he took the side of local Russian minorities. That’s an improvement over the Obama Method, which is to take the side of “history” while casting feckless and irritating aspersions on everyone. It’s an improvement, too, over the Bush Method, which was to go to war for the sake of a concept, like democracy, and then cross fingers that it would find a competent local champion.
2) Use proxies. The point of proxies is to avoid doing all the fighting yourself. And to have someone who will be beholden to you after you leave. But a proxy is pointless if you aren’t willing to support him properly, whether out of moral squeamishness or indifference to the outcome of the war. In the Balkan wars, we used the Croatian army as a proxy to help blunt Serb power in Bosnia. In Afghanistan we had a proxy in the Northern Alliance, which explains why the Taliban were deposed so swiftly. In Iraq, we made insufficient use of one proxy, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and disbanded what could have been the other, the standing Iraqi army. We had to do everything ourselves. If we’re not prepared to accept that our proxies may not perfectly represent our values, perhaps it’s best not to intervene at all.
3) Define a realistic objective. Mr. Obama’s constant assessment of Russia’s intervention in Syria was that it was destined to become a replay of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with hundreds of thousands of ground troops taking ever-greater casualties from wily mujahedeen fighters. Yet again, Mr. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know. Mr. Putin couldn’t afford a long intervention in Syria. But he knew that a small but dynamic deployment of aircraft could destroy the Assad regime’s relatively weak moderate opposition, turning the Syrian war into a referendum—both domestically and internationally—between the regime and ISIS. Whose side are we on, now?
4) Remember the Earl Butz rule. It’s named after the former secretary of agriculture, who remarked, in reference to a papal edict regarding contraception, “You no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules.” One of the purposes of military intervention is to shape the diplomatic outcome, which is why Mr. Kerry is so strikingly irrelevant in negotiating an end to the Syrian war.
5) Preserve your options. Russia has withdrawn from Syria—except where it hasn’t. It will maintain an upgraded naval facility in the port of Tartus, along with an air base. Mr. Putin has made it clear he’s prepared to return forces to Syria at will, and the success of the operation means any return will have popular backing. That was an option the U.S. could have exercised in Iraq, or Libya, by maintaining a military presence sufficient to suppress insurgents, deter Iranians, and balance competing sectarian interests. We didn’t, and the results are well known.
So what should the U.S. do in Syria? Here’s a thought: Give up on a unitary Syrian state, which guarantees a zero-sum struggle for power instead of a division of territorial spoils. Support Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria, backed by a tripwire U.S. force to deter Turkish intervention, and an Alawite state around Latakia, backed by Russia, with the proviso that the Assads must go. Destroy ISIS and other Sunni jihadist groups by combining massive U.S. air power and a coalition of Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian troops. Problem fixed? Not quite. But it shrinks the Syrian tumor. The point of intervention isn’t to solve everything. And as Vladimir has reminded the world again, trying to solve everything solves nothing. |
PUTIN’S “SACRED MISSION” IN SYRIA
Dr. Anna Geifman
BESA, Mar. 27, 2016
On September 30, 2015, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian warplanes into Syria to begin regular aerial bombardments of targets that Moscow defined as sources of “jihadi terror.” The intervention followed an official invitation from the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who had asked his Russian ally for help against the “jihadists.” The Kremlin’s official statements described jihadists as forces that threatened stability within and beyond Syria’s borders. Hence, many observers initially assumed that Putin’s main ambition was to destroy the Islamic State, Al-Nusra, and other terrorist organizations.
Yet from the outset, Russian warplanes primarily targeted the Free Syrian Army and other armed organizations considered by most to be moderate, but that constituted a threat to the Alawite regime’s strategic centers. Not until November 2015, weeks after the Syrian campaign had begun, did the Russians shift their military focus to the Islamic State.
Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev was unequivocal about Russia’s intentions. “Russia has no plans to stop its bombing campaign against rebel positions in Syria until Moscow’s allies in Damascus can achieve peace on favorable terms,” he said in an interview. According to Medvedev, Russia would continue to target any of Assad’s opponents, for “they are all bandits and terrorists.” Putin wishes to present himself as a loyal friend to Assad, his only Middle Eastern ally, whose regime Moscow hopes to preserve.
Some contend that Putin decided to intervene primarily to distract the West from his aggression in the Ukraine. Still others maintain that Putin’s central aim was to offset the humiliation of having lost extensive territory following the breakdown of the USSR, a calamity Putin considers “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” According to this premise, Russia is striving in Syria to convey the image of a superpower after two decades of “submissive” foreign policy vis-à-vis the US. If we are to trust Medvedev’s most recent statements, Russia has revived the Cold War during its president’s third term in office.
Traditionally, Western scholars have explained Russia’s aggressive Middle Eastern policy initiatives by its wish to access warm water ports. While access to the Syrian port Tartus is certainly important, it is not critical, because the Crimea’s Sevastopol does not freeze in winter. Thus, it appears that even key geopolitical factors are insufficient to validate the new Russian adventure.
Russia’s urgent need for access to the Mediterranean, which borders on obsession, may not be explicable solely by strategic or economic factors. The tendency to intervene in foreign conflicts might have to do with patterns of Russian historical development, and might reveal more profound and essential, if unappreciated, patterns in Russian political culture. These patterns may in fact have become integral parts of the national identity, guiding its leaders and determining policy. The origins of these patterns are traceable to the fifteenth century.
In 1453, the Byzantine Empire was defeated by the Turks. In Russia, the fall of Constantinople was seen as a divine punishment to the Greeks for straying from true Orthodoxy. In 1492, Metropolitan Zosimus called Moscow “the new city of Constantine,” the original capital of Christianity. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, Philotheus, a monk in the Pskov monastery, wrote a memorandum to Tsar Vasilii III in which he developed this idea further.
The “first Rome” and the “second Rome” (Constantinople), Philotheus claimed, had lapsed into heresy and ceased to be the centers of the Christian world, and should be replaced by Moscow. Because of their great sins, the “two Romes have fallen, a third stands, and a fourth there will not be.” Until the day of final redemption, Philotheus wrote, Moscow would be the spiritual center of the whole Christian world. This idea became known as “Moscow—the Third Rome.”
Russia’s role was to be properly messianic, with Moscow taking upon itself no less than the “special responsibility … [for] the salvation of all humanity.” For centuries, this doctrine remained an integral part of the Russian national mythology and the “fundamental principle of the official ideology” of the Russian state. The dogma justified Russian imperial ambitions, insofar as it legitimized the idea that it was Russia’s destiny to be a “light unto the nations” and to lead the world, which had lost true faith, to its final salvation.
Ever since this dogma crystallized in the sixteenth century, Russians have been persistently taught that their political history is “suffused with sacred significance,” representing “the culminating chapter of a sequence of historical events leading up to and including the apocalypse.” Many experts regarded the “reality of the apocalypse as an historical event . . . [that] can be seen with great frequency through the records of Russian history.”
The key here is that Russia’s messianic role is assumed, regardless of the nature of the political regime—be it tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet. Historians have underscored “various parallels between this conception of Russia’s special historical responsibilities as the head of the true Christian church and the Soviet Union’s special historical responsibilities as the guardian of one true (Marxist-Leninist) doctrine of communism.” Putin adapted the idea for the post-Soviet reality.
Following the 2008 economic crisis and the 2011 public protests against election fraud, Putin realized that he could not sustain his regime’s legitimacy or maintain mass support without a tradition-based messianic mission. He did not invent a new ideology but simply reformulated and popularized the vital concept of Russia’s “greatness.” That the Russian state is “great,” according to the time-honored meaning of the word, means that it directs the world along a visionary path towards a redemptive goal.
Since 2012, Putin has insisted that Western societies “have moved away from their roots” and forsaken their “Christian values,” which has led to “degradation and . . . a profound demographic and moral crisis.” Unlike those societies, Russia has returned to the path of true faith, which, according to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, has triggered Western hostility—presumably because Russia’s Orthodox Christian goals are at odds with those of the apostates. Putin’s nationalist supporters emphasize the sacred aspirations that supposedly guide Moscow’s policies in faraway lands. The ever-popular stage star Zhanna Bichevskaia, for example, sang in a hit performance in May 2014 that “[we] will recapture Russia’s Sevastopol. The Crimean peninsula will be Russian again [as well as] our sovereign Bosporus, our Constantinople, and Jerusalem, the shrine of humanity.” Putin is clearly counting on the fact that over the centuries, the Russian people have absorbed the idea that expansion is spiritually justified. To be a good (and popular) leader in their eyes means to be a messianic leader pursuing a messianic foreign policy…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE WORLD IS VLADIMIR PUTIN’S STAGE, BUT CRACKS APPEAR ON THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT’S HOMEFRONT Mark MacKinnon
Globe & Mail, Mar. 6, 2016
The news on state television shows Russia advancing on every front. Top of the bulletin, most nights, are images of Russian soldiers in Syria, apparently monitoring the wobbly ceasefire there. Then come clips of meetings between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and foreign dignitaries such as United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon. Later are scenes from Ukraine, a country portrayed as descending into chaos since turning its back on Moscow. The message is easy to grasp for viewers across all 11 time zones of this sprawling country: Russia is back.
The West tried to isolate Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea and failed. It is too big and too powerful to be ignored. Much of what passes for the news on the television here is outright propaganda – independent media outlets having been marginalized or taken over by the state more than a decade ago – but the messaging works because it nonetheless contains more than a kernel of truth.
In Syria, seven months of Russian air strikes have tilted the conflict back in favour of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and have put additional pressure on the European Union by sending fresh tides of refugees in that direction. (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top commander in Europe accused Russia and Syria this week of “deliberately weaponizing migration” as the continent braces to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees again this year.)…
In Ukraine, where the conflict between Russia and the West began in earnest with the fall of Viktor Yanukovych two years ago, another ceasefire is holding around the Moscow-backed separatist enclaves in the southeast of the country, a peace of sorts that puts the country’s Western-backed government in a difficult corner while granting the Kremlin many of its key aims.
At home, a domestic opposition has been trembling since last year’s killing of former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Kremlin adviser told The Globe and Mail last week that it was “95 per cent” certain that Mr. Putin would serve six more years in the presidency after his current term runs out in 2018. So, two years on from the annexation of Crimea, is Mr. Putin winning his high-stakes showdown with the West? The short answer is yes. So far.
“Russia has showed that it’s much stronger than it had been regarded by international media and the international elites,” said Sergei Markov, a member of the country’s Public Chamber that monitors government decisions. In both Syria and Ukraine, “Russia has shown that it’s an actor without which it’s impossible to resolve the situation,” he said. The longer reply is that the Russian leader, while advancing on the global stage, may have left himself exposed on the home front. And his victories abroad may soon look Pyrrhic unless his foreign-policy gains are followed by a domestic economic turnaround.
Low oil prices (Russia is the world’s second-largest oil producer, after Saudi Arabia) and Western sanctions over Ukraine have shoved the economy into a tailspin, threatening the key social compact of Mr. Putin’s 16-plus years in power: Kremlin-managed economic stability in exchange for the public’s passive support for its agenda. “The model of development that was pretty successful in the 2000s and started to stagnate in the 2010s now has been exhausted,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the Moscow-based foreign-policy journal Russia in Global Affairs. “In the foreign-policy game, [Mr. Putin] is pretty successful, but the general course is pretty unclear.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]Contents
STALIN, RUSSIA’S NEW HERO
Alec Luhn
New York Times, Mar. 11, 2016
At School No. 58 in Penza, a regional capital that is an eight and a half hour drive southeast of Moscow, the jury is still out on Joseph Stalin. “He was a great man, unique in history,” Zhenya Viktorov, an 11th grader, told me on a recent visit. His classmate Amina Kurayev was more circumspect: “It wasn’t as terrible as they say.” And what about the millions of Soviets who were shot or sent to the gulags? “No one was repressed for no reason,” Zhenya said. When I asked him how many political opponents Stalin killed, he told me “thousands,” and argued that the purges weren’t as “big or inhumane as the media likes to say.”
At least 15 million people were killed in prisons and labor camps under Stalin and his predecessor Vladimir Lenin, according to Alexander Yakovlev, who led a commission on rehabilitating victims of political repression under President Boris N. Yeltsin. Estimates vary, but Stalin’s victims alone certainly number in the millions.
And yet views like Zhenya’s are becoming more common in Russia. Polls show a gradual improvement in perceptions of Stalin, who led the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. A survey released on March 1 by the Levada Center, a research organization based in Moscow, found that 40 percent of Russians thought the Stalin era brought “more good than bad,” up from 27 percent in 2012. In an annual Levada survey published in January 2015, a majority of Russians (52 percent) said Stalin “probably” or “definitely” played a positive role in the country.
This quiet rehabilitation began after Vladimir V. Putin came to power in 1999. Stalin’s legacy has become a tacit justification as the Putin government has strengthened its own grip on power. Under Stalin, “order” and national prestige trumped human rights or civil liberties. “By raising the figure of Stalin, the Putin regime is trying to raise the idea that collective interests are more important than individual lives, and that means the regime has less responsibility to society,” Lev Gudkov, who conducts the Levada Center’s Stalin polls, told me.
Here in Penza, the Communist Party opened a Stalin Center in December. It’s just a few rooms of old photographs and newspapers and a lecture hall with a giant portrait of Stalin, but it makes a statement. A golden bust of Stalin stands in front of the building. Sites like these are becoming more and more common. In 2015, the Communist Party, which has 92 of 450 seats in Parliament and often toes the Kremlin line, raised a banner with pictures of Lenin and Stalin as the backdrop for the party plenary session. At Victory Day celebrations last May 9, his image adorned a fence next to a Moscow police station. Moscow’s best-known bookstore was recently promoting a book called “How Stalin Defeated Corruption.”
School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader. Mr. Putin has backed a planned monument to the victims of Soviet political repressions in Moscow, but that’s likely pure politics. He wants to play to the masses who are growing enamored of Stalin without alienating those Russians, such as the Moscow intelligentsia, who abhor him. The president has also carefully praised Stalin: “We can criticize the commanders and Stalin all we like, but can anyone say with certainty that a different approach would have enabled us to win?” he once said about World War II…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
On Topic
How Russian Special Forces are Shaping the Fight in Syria: Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Washington Post, Mar. 29, 2016—The troops that recently recaptured Palmyra, Syria, from the Islamic State included Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces. And on Monday, Russian officials said there was another group that contributed to the victory: Russia’s elite special forces, also known as Spetsnaz.
Israeli Air Force: Russian Air Power in Syria Remains Robust: Barbara Opall-Rome, Defense News, Mar. 28, 2016—Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s widely publicized, mid-March order to evacuate the bulk of his forces from Syria, Russian air power in the country remains substantial, according to the Israeli Air Force (IAF), with newly deployed attack helicopters replacing many of the fighter bombers that have made their way home.
Israel’s Alliance That Could Potentially Offset Enhanced Russian and Iranian Power: Leslie Susser, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 26, 2016—The past several weeks have seen a flurry of diplomatic activity reinforcing the tripartite alliance between Israel, Greece and Cyprus.
Why Putin Wants Syria: Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta, Middle East Forum, Spring, 2016—Russia’s military intervention in Syria that began on September 30, 2015, is its first major intrusion into the Levant since June 1772 when “Russian forces bombarded, stormed, and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria.” Then as now, the Russians backed a ruthless local client; then as now, they found themselves in “a boiling cauldron of factional-ethnic strife, which they tried to simplify with cannonades and gunpowder.”