At the end of the day, what happened was a disaster and no honest observer can deny that, but they also shouldn’t try to spin it as Russia’s fault like Trump did in his posts.
His full messages can be read here and here, but what follows are the relevant excerpts as they pertain to those two. Here’s what he wrote in his first post:
“Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years. This is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment of protecting the RED LINE IN THE SAND, and all hell broke out, with Russia stepping in. But now they are, like possibly Assad himself, being forced out, and it may actually be the best thing that can happen to them. There was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”
And here’s what he wrote in his second one:
“Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success.”
As can be seen, both reference Ukrainian claims of Russia suffering over 600,000 casualties, which is just a cheap propaganda point in this context to emphasize its commitment to the special operation. Russia’s prioritization of its military operations against Ukraine over its anti-terrorist ones in Syria is also mentioned in each post too.
Unlike the casualty figures that Trump cited, this is mostly accurate, but he still put a negative spin on it claiming that Russia was incapable of stopping the terrorists’ march.
The reality is that Russia could have hypothetically diverted some of its Aerospace Forces from the Ukrainian front to the Syrian one, but that would have been a waste of resources since the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) surrendered entire cities without putting up a fight.
Bombs can only do so much in a conflict such as this one when ground forces are ultimately needed to win the war and keep the peace. If the SAA wasn’t going to fight to save Syria, then Russia wasn’t going to expend additional resources for this.
While it’s true that Russia protected Syria for years, it also encouraged Assad to implement UNSC Resolution 2254 from December 2015, which called for far-reaching political reforms like promulgating a new constitution and holding UN-supervised elections.
As regards the first imperative, Russia even drafted a constitution for Syria to help with this, though Assad defiantly rejected it due to its numerous concessions. In hindsight, the latest disaster could have been avoided had he gone along with that plan.
Therefore, while Syria was indisputably the victim of foreign-backed aggression orchestrated first and foremost by Turkey, the coup de grace that ended the Syrian Arab Republic was to a large extent inadvertently facilitated by none other than Assad himself.
Russia rescued Syria in late 2015 because it wanted to prevent the creation of a black hole of instability from which terrorists could threaten it. The intervention was never meant to rescue Assad personally and keep him in power indefinitely.
At the time, the SAA was still putting up a fight for the country, hence why Russia assisted them with its Aerospace Forces in order to aid their ground operations. Russia also assumed that Assad would repay the favor of saving his state by making the political compromises requested of him afterwards such as those that its earlier mentioned draft constitution for Syria entailed no matter how painful they may be. What ended up happening was altogether different from what Russia expected.
Instead of getting stronger during the ceasefires that Russia helped broker and preparing adequate defenses around the country’s main cities in the event that such cessations of hostilities were abruptly broken, the SAA became weaker, atrophied, and turned into a shell of its former self.
As for Assad, he became more arrogant and arguably relied more on Iranian support to hedge against the scenario of Russia curtailing some of its own support as a means of incentivizing him to make political concessions.
The end result was the disaster that just unfolded whereby Assad and the SAA surrendered the country to terrorists without a fight, even leaving behind Russian equipment that they captured and will likely pass along to their Turkish patron, which’ll probably give it to the US to study.
Assad didn’t even address his nation once and fled the capital without a word. He and his armed forces behaved very shamefully, but Russia still let him receive asylum because it doesn’t betray its friends, as a senior diplomat said.
Comentarios