The
Syrian Test of Trump-Putin Accord
The U.S. mainstream media remains obsessed over
Russia’s alleged “meddling” in last fall’s
election, but the real test of bilateral
cooperation may come on the cease-fire in Syria,
writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
July 09,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The immediate prospect for significant
improvement in U.S.-Russia relations now depends
on something tangible: Will the forces that
sabotaged previous ceasefire agreements in Syria
succeed in doing so again, all the better to
keep alive the “regime change” dreams of the
neoconservatives and liberal interventionists?
Or will
President Trump succeed where President Obama
failed by bringing the U.S. military and
intelligence bureaucracies into line behind a
cease-fire rather than allowing insubordination
to win out?
These
are truly life-or-death questions for the Syrian
people and could have profound repercussions
across Europe, which has been destabilized by
the flood of refugees fleeing the horrific
violence in the six-year proxy war that has
ripped Syria apart.
But you
would have little inkling of this important
priority from the large page-one headlines
Saturday morning in the U.S. mainstream media,
which continued its long obsession with the more
ephemeral question of whether Russian President
Vladimir Putin would confess to the sin of
“interference” in the 2016 U.S. election and
promise to repent.
Thus,
the headlines: “Trump, Putin talk election
interference” (Washington Post) and
“Trump asks Putin About Meddling During
Election” (New York Times). There was
also the expected harrumphing from commentators
on CNN and MSNBC when Putin dared to deny that
Russia had interfered.
In both
the big newspapers and on cable news shows, the
potential for a ceasefire in southern Syria –
set to go into effect on Sunday – got decidedly
second billing.
Yet,
the key to Putin’s assessment of Donald Trump is
whether the U.S. President is strong enough to
make the mutually agreed-upon ceasefire
stick. As Putin is well aware, to do so Trump
will have to take on the same “deep-state”
forces that cheerily scuttled similar agreements
in the past. In other words, the actuarial
tables for this cease-fire are not good; long
life for the agreement will take something just
short of a miracle.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have to
face down hardliners in both the Pentagon and
CIA. Tillerson probably expects that Defense
Secretary James “Mad-Dog” Mattis and CIA
Director Mike Pompeo will cooperate by ordering
their troops and operatives inside Syria to
restrain the U.S.-backed “moderate rebels.”
But it
remains to be seen if Mattis and Pompeo can
control the forces their agencies have unleashed
in Syria. If recent history is any guide, it
would be folly to rule out another “accidental”
U.S. bombing of Syrian government troops or a
well-publicized “chemical attack” or some other
senseless “war crime” that social media and
mainstream media will immediately blame on
President Bashar al-Assad.
Bitter
Experience
Last
fall’s limited ceasefire in Syria, painstakingly
worked out over 11 months by Secretary of State
John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov and approved personally by Presidents
Obama and Putin, lasted only five days (from
Sept. 12-17) before it was scuttled by
“coalition” air strikes on well-known, fixed
Syrian army positions, which killed between 64
and 84 Syrian troops and wounded about 100
others.
In
public remarks bordering on the insubordinate,
senior Pentagon officials a few days before the
air attack on Sept. 17, showed unusually open
skepticism regarding key aspects of the Kerry-Lavrov
agreement – like sharing intelligence with the
Russians (an important provision of the deal
approved by both Obama and Putin).
The
Pentagon’s resistance and the “accidental”
bombing of Syrian troops brought these
uncharacteristically blunt words from Foreign
Minister Lavrov on Russian TV on Sept. 26:
“My
good friend John Kerry … is under fierce
criticism from the U.S. military machine.
Despite the fact that, as always, [they] made
assurances that the U.S. Commander in Chief,
President Barack Obama, supported him in his
contacts with Russia … apparently the military
does not really listen to the Commander in
Chief.”
Lavrov
specifically criticized Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman, Gen. Joseph Dunford for telling
Congress that he opposed sharing intelligence
with Russia despite the fact, as Lavrov put it,
“the agreements concluded on direct orders of
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S.
President Barack Obama [who] stipulated that
they would share intelligence.” Noting this
resistance inside the U.S. military bureaucracy,
Lavrov added, “It is difficult to work with such
partners.”
Putin
picked up on the theme of insubordination in an
Oct. 27 speech at the Valdai International
Discussion Club, in which he openly lamented:
“My
personal agreements with the President of the
United States have not produced results. …
people in Washington are ready to do everything
possible to prevent these agreements from being
implemented in practice.”
On
Syria, Putin decried the lack of a “common front
against terrorism after such lengthy
negotiations, enormous effort, and difficult
compromises.”
Lavrov’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman,
meanwhile, even expressed sympathy for Kerry’s
quixotic effort, giving him an “A” for
effort.after then-Defense Secretary Ashton
Carter dispatched U.S. warplanes to provide an
early death to the cease-fire so painstakingly
worked out by Kerry and Lavrov for almost a
year.
For his
part, Kerry expressed regret – in words
reflecting the hapless hubris befitting the
chief envoy of the world’s “only indispensible”
country – conceding that he had been unable to
“align” all the forces in play.
With
the ceasefire in tatters, Kerry publicly
complained on Sept. 29, 2016: “Syria is as
complicated as anything I’ve ever seen in public
life, in the sense that there are probably about
six wars or so going on at the same time – Kurd
against Kurd, Kurd against Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Sunni, Shia, everybody against ISIL,
people against Assad, Nusra [Al Qaeda’s Syrian
affiliate]. This is as mixed-up sectarian and
civil war and strategic and proxies, so it’s
very, very difficult to be able to align
forces.”
Admitting
Deep-State Pre-eminence
Only in December 2016, in
an interview
with Matt Viser of the Boston Globe,
did Kerry admit that his efforts to deal with
the Russians had been thwarted by then-Defense
Secretary Ashton Carter – as well as all those
forces he found so difficult to align.
“Unfortunately we had divisions within our own
ranks that made the implementation [of the
ceasefire agreement] extremely hard to
accomplish,” Kerry said. “But it … could have
worked. … The fact is we had an agreement with
Russia … a joint cooperative effort.
“Now we
had people in our government who were bitterly
opposed to doing that,” he said. “I regret that.
I think that was a mistake. I think you’d have a
different situation there conceivably now if
we’d been able to do that.”
The
Globe’s Viser described Kerry as
frustrated. Indeed, it was a tough way for Kerry
to end nearly 34 years in public office.
After Friday’s
discussions
with President Trump, Kremlin eyes will be
focused on Secretary of State Tillerson,
watching to see if he has better luck than Kerry
did in getting Ashton Carter’s successor, James
“Mad Dog” Mattis and CIA’s latest
captive-director Pompeo into line behind what
President Trump wants to do.
As the
new U.S.-Russia agreed-upon ceasefire goes into
effect on Sunday, Putin will be eager to see if
this time Trump, unlike Obama, can make a
ceasefire in Syria stick; or whether, like
Obama, Trump will be unable to prevent it from
being sabotaged by Washington’s deep-state
actors.
The proof will be in the pudding and, clearly,
much depends on what happens in the next few
weeks. At this point, it will take a leap of
faith on Putin’s part to have much confidence
that the ceasefire will hold.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the
Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. As a
CIA analyst for 27 years, he led the Soviet
Foreign Policy Branch and, during President
Ronald Reagan’s first term, conducted the early
morning briefings with the
President’s Daily Brief.
He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article was first published by
Consortium News
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views expressed in this article are solely those
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