News Comment 2/12 – Syrian Peace Talks

So Kerry and Lavrov have worked together to deliver a roadmap to peace in Syria. There’s been talk of a nationwide cessation of hostilities within days, the fresh delivery of aid, choppered in by the same big old Hinds that have been making rocket runs and emptying their chainguns into towns and villages from Idlib to Aleppo since September. We’re talking safe zones and structured surrenders, the opposition laying down arms, multi-lateral talks, and so on. Of course this has all been made possible by Russia, according to a set of calculations that afford them a win-win regardless of what may or may not result from the agreement. The media is fawning over all this even though it essentially amounts to Kerry bending over for the Russians.

I mean let’s think about this for a moment.

Point one. While Kerry has announced that there could be a cessation of hostilities within days, the Russians say their target date is the first of March. Now, a lot could happen in another two weeks of offensive. Aleppo is already all but encircled, the last bastion of revolution hemmed in like rats in a cityscape like something out of Germany circa May ‘45. Starving, supplies cut, pummeled day and night by airstrikes, the Russians flying hundreds of sorties a day from their modest airbases. With the encirclement Assad is largely in control of what is often called “essential Syria,” the populated western regions that have been the center of the national economy for decades. The obvious next move is to secure the territory north of Aleppo up to the Turkish border, a prospect that has Erdogan frothing impotently. Even if the shooting were to stop miraculously tomorrow we’d have Assad in a position of power that would have been inconceivable six months ago when everyone was predicting the imminent collapse of the SAA.

A second key point to all this is that the ceasefire does not include ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or “others.” These are recognized terrorist groups, sure, but the al-Nusra Front has become a dominant force in the rebel controlled areas of late, and they’re integrated into rebel formations to the point that a clear distinction between moderates and jihadis only exists on paper and in the minds of out-of-touch junior staffers in the CIA. As far as I can tell, the Nusra exception gives the Russians a green light to continue bombing all rebel groups as they see fit, on the plausible assertion that those groups are operating under the Al-Qaeda umbrella.

Point three: The timing of this seems calculated to preempt a Turkish or Saudi incursion. I’ve been watching the buildup of forces on the Turkish border and the ferocious fighting against the PKK for weeks now. I’ve seen grainy cell-phone video of endless truck-loads of Saudi Humvees crossing into Jordan. I’ve heard the American Defense Secretary speak in welcoming terms of an intervention, of allies “stepping up,” as if this were game of football. By making calls for a cease fire now, the Russians have caught those actors in a position where any incursion would make for terrible optics, a golden opportunity for narrative building, for accusations of deliberate regional sabotage backed by unscrupulous Western interests. Nobody wants to shatter a peace deal.

Okay, step back and think on how extraordinary this all is, how thoroughly we’ve been beaten. Forget “Assad Must Go,” forget “Red Lines” and “Safe Zones” and “Train and Equip.” Our agreeing to the terms of this deal is a monumental humiliation, and one that will profoundly shape the future of the region. We’ve been made out as what we are, a bunch of fools. Remember in October, all those haughty statements about how Putin was getting himself into a quagmire, how there couldn’t be a military solution? How this was all the impotent gesture of a despot desperate for attention after his failure in the Ukraine? How’s that looking now?

I was sitting in a garage yesterday waiting for the bad news (twenty-two hundred dollars worth) on my beat-to-shit car when I read this interview in the Atlantic. Andrew Tabler articulates much of what I’ve been intuiting from my amateurish outsider position better than I ever could and I highly recommend a read-through.

And, lest we forget, twenty-minutes of footage from the Aleppo offensive. SAA, Iranian militias, Hezbollah troops in full armor wielding state of the art weapons (when did that happen?). The video is muddled and random, but gives some indication of the ferocity of the fighting that has sent a new wave of refugees scrambling for cover on the Turkish border.