Mick Hartley

More on Syria as precursor to Ukraine from Jacob Siegel at UnHerd:

The 11th anniversary of the war in Syria passed earlier this month with little notice, eclipsed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the two wars are intimately connected. It was Russia’s entry into the Syrian war in 2013, at the invitation of the United States, that set the stage for its initial incursions into Ukraine the following year; the prequel to the full-scale invasion last month.

A year into the war in Syria, in 2012, President Obama declared that chemical weapons attacks there were a red line that, if crossed, would trigger “enormous consequences”. When the White House concluded “with high confidence” that Bashar al Assad’s forces were responsible for a Sarin attack that killed 1,429 people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama was placed in a bind. If he didn’t do something, it would look like a capitulation. But any reprisal risked drawing the US into another Middle Eastern war and jeopardising the nuclear deal with Iran that was the linchpin of Obama’s foreign policy agenda. That was where Moscow came in.

Russia volunteered to oversee the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program in a deal that would allow the White House to save face without threatening its pivot towards Iran. It might have seemed like a win-win proposition. But Russia was hardly neutral: Moscow was both a key ally of Iran and of the Assad dynasty, and saw its role in the Syrian war as the way to acquire its long-sought-after naval base on the eastern Mediterranean. “Syria mattered to Russia because it mattered to Iran,” explains Levant analyst Tony Badran. Making Moscow a “peacemaker” meant that, “for all the moralising rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained [Obama’s] principal partner in the Syrian arena”….

Less than a year after entering Syria, in February 2014, Russia launched its initial invasion into Ukraine targeting Crimea and the Donbas. Encountering little resistance, Russia stepped up its campaign in Syria, where in September 2015 Putin ordered airstrikes to rescue his embattled ally Assad. Of course Putin declared that these were “preventitive” measures, necessary to “destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupy, not wait for them to come to our house”. The same rhetoric is now used to justify the assault on Ukraine, another preventative war according to Putin, but this time a campaign of “denazification” and “demilitarisation”.

Play the full sequence out from 2013 to the present and Russia’s arrival as a “peacekeeper” in the Syrian war, becomes the first step in a series of expansionist military interventions that led to the invasion of Ukraine last month. The experience in Syria, which intensified after 2015, provided the Russian military with “priceless combat experience”, according to the Chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. Russia’s repeated attacks on anti-government rebels and Syrian civilians gave its military the chance to test out “more than 320 types of different weapons” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu bragged last year.

The nuclear deal with Iran was the linchpin of Obama’s foreign policy agenda then, and seem to be the linchpin of Biden's foreign policy agenda now. But if back then it was a disastrous misreading of the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, it's much much worse now. And Russia is still vital to the success of this particular chimera….