Obama's New Middle East - Caroline Glick
The new Syria is being born in the rubble of Aleppo.
The eastern side of the city, which has been under the control of US-supported rebel groups since 2012, is being bombed into the Stone Age by Russian and Syrian aircraft.
All avenues of escape have been blocked. A UN aid convoy was bombed in violation of a fantasy cease-fire. Medical facilities and personnel are being targeted by Russia and Syrian missiles and barrel bombs to make survival impossible.
It is hard to assess how long the siege of eastern Aleppo by Russia, its Iranian and Hezbollah partners and its Syrian regime puppet will last. But what is an all but foregone conclusion now is that eastern Aleppo will fall. And with its fall, the Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Assad axis will consolidate its control over all of western Syria.
Fighting a guerrilla war with the help of the Sunni population, the anti-regime militias were able to fight from and hide from within the civilian population. Consequently, they were all but impossible to defeat.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to join the fight, he and his generals soon recognized that this manner of fighting ensured perpetual war. So they changed tactics. The new strategy involves speeding up the depopulation and ethnic cleansing of rebel-held areas. The massive refugee flows from Syria over the past year are a testament to the success of the barbaric war plan. The idea is to defeat the rebel forces by destroying the sheltering civilian populations.
By
adopting a strategy of total war, Putin has ensured that far from becoming the
quagmire that President Barack Obama warned him Syria would become, the war in
Syria has instead become a means to transform Russia into the dominant
superpower in the Mediterranean, at the US’s expense.
In exchange for saving Assad’s neck and enabling Iran and Hezbollah to control Syria, Russia has received the capacity to successfully challenge US power.
Israel’s ability to permit the US access to its air bases is no
longer assured. Russia has deployed air assets to Syria that have canceled
Israel’s regional air superiority. Under these circumstances, in a hypothetical
Russian-US confrontation, Israel may be unwilling to risk Russian retaliation
for a decision to permit the US to use its air bases against Russia.In exchange for saving Assad’s neck and enabling Iran and Hezbollah to control Syria, Russia has received the capacity to successfully challenge US power.
America’s loss of control over the eastern Mediterranean is a self-induced disaster.
For four
years, as Putin stood on the sidelines and hedged his bets, Obama did nothing.
As Iran and Hezbollah devoted massive financial and military assets to
maintaining their puppet Assad in power, the Obama administration squandered
chance after chance to bring down the regime and stem Iran’s regional imperial
advance.
For his refusal to take action when such action could have easily been taken, Obama shares the responsibility for what Syria has become. This state of affairs is all the more infuriating because the hard truth is that it wouldn’t have been hard for the US to defeat the Iranian- Hezbollah axis. The fact that even without US help the anti-regime forces managed to hold on for four years shows how weak the challenge posed by Iran and Hezbollah actually was.
Russia only went into Syria when Putin was absolutely convinced that Obama would do nothing to stop him from dislodging America as the premier global power in the region.
Obama chose to stand on the sidelines in Syria because he wanted to make friends with Iran. Obama began his secret courtship of the mullahs even before he officially took office eight years ago.
So Obama let Syria burn. He let Iran and Hezbollah transform the country
into their colony. And he let Putin transform the Mediterranean into a Russian
lake. Obama enabled the ethnic cleansing of Syria’s Sunni majority, and in turn
facilitated the refugee crisis that is changing the face not only of the Middle
East but of Europe as well.For his refusal to take action when such action could have easily been taken, Obama shares the responsibility for what Syria has become. This state of affairs is all the more infuriating because the hard truth is that it wouldn’t have been hard for the US to defeat the Iranian- Hezbollah axis. The fact that even without US help the anti-regime forces managed to hold on for four years shows how weak the challenge posed by Iran and Hezbollah actually was.
Russia only went into Syria when Putin was absolutely convinced that Obama would do nothing to stop him from dislodging America as the premier global power in the region.
Obama chose to stand on the sidelines in Syria because he wanted to make friends with Iran. Obama began his secret courtship of the mullahs even before he officially took office eight years ago.
It is ironic that the new Middle East is coming into focus as Shimon Peres, the failed visionary of a fantasy- based new Middle East, is being laid to rest. But to survive in the real new Middle East, Israel must bury Peres’s belief that peace is built by appeasing enemies along with him. The world in which we live has a place for dreamers.
But dreams, unhinged from reality, lead to Aleppo, not to peace.
[Jerusalem Post via Jewish World Review]
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1 comment:
This is an interesting but misguided take on a complicated situation. OBAMA didn't sit this out to appease Iran. He did it because failed attempt after failed attempt to intervene and "help" have proven disastrous. From Bush's abject failure in Iraq that empowered Iran, to attempts to sit back in the Arab Spring in Egypt and not sit back in Libya have shown this is a part of the world that doesn't do well with outside intervention. Russia is there at the behest of Syria but it is far from clear where this will end or how the Russians will view it as time goes by.
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