The Obama administration and the US intelligence community have concluded that Russia is set to start flying combat missions from a new air base inside Syria, but there is disagreement inside the US government on what to do about it.
Thursday, at the White House, top officials were scheduled meet at the National Security Council Deputies Committee level to discuss how to respond to the growing buildup of Russian military equipment and personnel in Latakia, a city on the Syrian coast controlled by the Bashar Al Assad regime. Obama has called on his national security officials to come up with a plan as soon as possible, as intelligence reports pour in about the Russian plans to set up an air base there.
The options are to try to confront Russia inside Syria or, as some in the White House are advocating, cooperate with Russia there on the fight against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
The United States State Department had already begun pushing back against the Russian moves, for example by asking Bulgaria and Greece to deny overflight permissions to Syria-bound Russian transport planes. But the State Department made those moves on its own and when the president found out, he was upset with the department for failing to go through the inter-agency process, two officials said. The president wants his national security team to come up with a consensus on the way forward as early as this week.
For some in the White House, the priority is to enlist more countries to fight against Daesh, and they fear making the relationship with Russia any more heated. They are seriously considering accepting the Russian buildup as a fait accompli, and then working with Moscow to coordinate US and Russian strikes in northern Syria, where the US-led coalition operates every day.
For many in the Obama administration, especially those who work on Syria, the idea of acquiescing to Russian participation in the fighting is akin to admitting that the drive to oust Al Assad has failed.
Plus, they fear Russia will attack Syrian opposition groups that are fighting against Al Assad, using the war against Daesh as a cover.
“The Russians’ intentions are to keep [Al] Assad in power, not to fight [Daesh],” one administration official said. “They’ve shown their cards now.”
The US intelligence now shows that Russia is planning to send a force into Syria that is capable of striking targets on the ground. Two US officials told me that the intelligence community has collected evidence that Russia plans to deploy Mikoyan MiG 31 and Sukhoi Su-25 fighter planes to Latakia in the coming days and weeks. The military equipment that has already arrived includes air traffic control towers, aircraft maintenance supplies, and housing units for hundreds of personnel.
US Secretary of State John Kerry called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last Saturday to urge him to halt the Russian military buildup, but the Russian told Kerry that his military was doing nothing wrong and that Russia’s support for Syria would continue, according to one official who saw a readout of the call. That response was seen in the administration as a rebuke of Kerry’s efforts to reach out to Moscow to restart the Syrian political process. Kerry met with Lavrov and the Saudi foreign minister on the issue last month.
‘Greater and greater threat’
This is a turn of events from the situation this summer. In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Obama and according to Obama, Putin was moving away from a weakened Al Assad.
“I think they get a sense that the [Al] Assad regime is losing a grip over greater and greater swathes of territory inside Syria and that the prospects for a [Sunni] takeover or rout of the Syrian regime is not imminent, but becomes a greater and greater threat by the day,” Obama told the New York Times. “That offers us an opportunity to have a serious conversation with them.”
But since then, Putin has been moving away from a serious conversation with the US about a diplomatic solution in Syria. Just as the Russian military buildup was beginning last week, Putin said publicly that Al Assad was ready to engage with the “healthy” opposition, a far cry from the process the US is promoting, which would bring the western-supported Syrian opposition into a new round of negotiations with the regime.
“Russia’s support for the [Al] Assad regime is not helpful at all, it’s counterproductive, and it’s against some of the things they have said about trying to bring about a solution,” Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me Wednesday. “It’s disappointing, but it’s been consistent with some of the policies they’ve done in the past that we think are just wrong.”
Putin is planning to focus on the fight against “terrorism” in his speech later this month at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Russia will also host a ministerial-level meeting on the sidelines about fighting extremism, which it defines as including all the groups fighting the Al Assad regime, including the US-backed rebels. There is concern in the Obama administration, even among those who advocate confronting Russian actions in Syria, that the US has no real leverage to fight back. If Obama decides not to accept the Russian air force presence in Syria, he would have several options, all of which have drawbacks or limitations.
New sanctions
The US could impose new sanctions on Russia, although the current punishments related to Ukraine have not changed Putin’s calculus, and there is little chance European countries would join in on a new round. The US might warn Russia that its base is fair game for the opposition to attack, but that could spur Putin to double down on the deployment.
The US could try to stop the flow of Russian arms, but that would mean pressuring countries such as Iraq to stand up to Putin and Iran, which they might not agree to.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday he would try to impose sanctions on Russia from the congressional side if the administration does not move in that direction. He said that Russia’s military involvement in Syria will only make the terrorism threat and the refugee problems emanating from there worse.
“This is a chance for us to slap Russia hard, because what they are doing is making America less safe,” he said. “The Russians are just slapping President Obama and Secretary Kerry in the face. This is a complete insult to their efforts to try to find a solution to Syria. They’ve made [Al] Assad’s survivability more likely, which means the war in Syria never ends.”
The White House’s concerns about escalating tensions with Russia in Syria are legitimate, but cooperating with Russian forces on the ground or in the air would undermine whatever remaining credibility the US has with the Syrian opposition and the Gulf states that support it.
The US may not be able to stop Russia’s entry into fighting the Syrian civil war, but at a minimum America shouldn’t be seen as colluding with Moscow.
If that happens, the suspicion that Obama is actually working to preserve the Al Assad regime will have been confirmed.
— Washington Post
