{"id":970,"date":"2015-10-03T23:44:21","date_gmt":"2015-10-03T23:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/?p=970"},"modified":"2015-10-03T23:44:21","modified_gmt":"2015-10-03T23:44:21","slug":"double-edged-swords-rattle-over-russias-airstrikes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/10\/double-edged-swords-rattle-over-russias-airstrikes.html","title":{"rendered":"Double-edged swords rattle over Russia’s airstrikes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Russia'sWe may have all\u00a0heard of the double-edged sword. What you may not have heard\u00a0is that there are people dumb enough to actually create and use them in hope of harming perceived enemies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m thinking of the crazy situation in Syria, and more specifically\u00a0the requests by desperate Syrian\u00a0rebel\u00a0groups for advanced anti-aircraft weapons from the United States. According to these\u00a0terrorist Syrian rebel groups, they deserve American weapons because they are the “moderate” armed militants (as if moderates need their\u00a0assault rifles\u00a0and suicide bomb vests). They claim they are under attack by Russia’s airstrikes in Syria, and that they can’t defend themselves without the US responding by giving them more and better weapons.<\/p>\n

Of course, the United States cannot give the Syrian rebels high-altitude surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) against Russia for the same reasons that they could not give them anti-aircraft missiles against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. It’s questionable that Patriot missile\u00a0batteries, the type needed, (and already deployed at the Turkish border to protect the rebels from Syrian fighter jets) could be operated by lightly equipped militants and terrorists at all. Shoulder-launched missiles are already in the hands of the Syrian rebels and will continue to be useless.\u00a0But the\u00a0US’s own planes have been operating above Syria as part of a Coalition for months now. Any new rebel\u00a0weapons capable of shooting down the Russian warplanes would fall into ISIL and al-Qaeda hands and be used against the US-led Coalition’s aircraft too.<\/p>\n

The last time the United States delivered weapons supplies to terrorist rebel groups in Syria, many\u00a0of them fell into the hands of some of the worst and most dangerous extremists in the country, the al-Nusra Front.\u00a0Even worse, carefully “vetted” rebel groups that the Pentagon\u00a0had called “moderate” in front of Congress immediately joined al-Qaeda, along with their brand new American weapons. ISIL itself possesses a large stockpile of US weapons gained by the reckless supply\u00a0of armaments by the US into the region.<\/p>\n

Considering that the US can’t give the rebels the weapons needed to shoot down Russian and Syrian warplanes without also giving ISIL the ability to shoot down airliners and Coalition jets, the incompetent US Coalition has now become a key part of the Russian plan in Syria<\/a>. It is effectively blocking the US’s only option for confronting Russia’s new assistance to the Syrian government.<\/p>\n

As long as Russian jets share the skies with American jets, the two will avoid each other and be unable to do anything about each other, effectively cancelling out each other’s\u00a0pressure\u00a0and ensuring that neither side makes much\u00a0progress towards a military victory. With Moscow serious about Assad not being overthrown, the only solution is a negotiated peace in Cold War tradition, with Moscow on one side and Washington on the other. All other actors are irrelevant to such negotiation and simply obfuscate the real interests at work.<\/p>\n

It gets worse for the US government. For the last few years of the Civil War in Syria, the US and allies\u00a0accused an endless array of actors from the Lebanese Hezbollah to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)\u00a0of “propping up” the Assad government. Those actors now include the Russian Federation and possibly even China directly. The US couldn’t even break the original “resistance axis” of Iran, Hezbollah and Assad in Syria. What are its chances of defeating the same\u00a0axis, only now including Russia and China? The US may have gotten rid of Assad’s small arsenal of chemical weapons, only to invite the\u00a0Russian hydrogen bomb into the region.<\/p>\n

Russia’s airstrikes in Syria look like\u00a0pure\u00a0jujitsu by the martial artist President Vladimir Putin. Well aware of\u00a0the limits of Russian military power, Putin will rely on\u00a0the current\u00a0disarray, incompetence and lack of coordination of the US Coalition and rebels in Syria\u00a0rather than the strength of his\u00a0own forces. So long as US planes are safe in those skies, Russian planes will be, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

The US is trapped in Syria by years of commitment to the failed\u00a0revolution, whereas Russia can slip in and out of the country at will, inflicting billions of dollars of losses on US-supported\u00a0rebels cheaply every time. With economic sanctions already exhausted against Russia over Ukraine, and the Syrian rebels already armed to the maximum, the West has nothing left to threaten Putin with over his actions in Syria.<\/p>\n

The United States military doesn’t trust the so-called Syrian rebels, and after years being betrayed and manipulated by them, it has good reasons not to. The US has been too quick to see allies in the world where in fact none exist, which is why they failed to see\u00a0ISIL as a threat in Syria until much\u00a0too late.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, President Obama’s speeches on Syria have become stranger, motivated by the narcissism of refusing to accept he was wrong about the War.\u00a0“Syria will fall”<\/a>, he insists, a little less certain than he used to sound, and he assures\u00a0us all that\u00a0the country will then be ruled by\u00a0those\u00a0“folks”\u00a0Obama\u00a0picked\u00a0to rule the country – the fantastic four<\/a> remaining rebels\u00a0who are supposedly\u00a0not extremists. The more Obama tries to attack\u00a0Assad, the more the administration\u00a0bleeds money and credibility on\u00a0fantasies it refused to give up since\u00a02011, today leaning on the double-edged sword of the terrorists who want to attack both Assad and America.<\/p>\n

There is at least some poetic justice if we realise\u00a0that the one political change\u00a0the Syrian rebels ever really called for –\u00a0airstrikes on their country – ended up\u00a0landing on their own heads every time.<\/p>\n

\"hjb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We may have all\u00a0heard of the double-edged sword. What you may not have heard\u00a0is that there are people dumb enough to actually create and use them in hope of harming perceived enemies. I’m thinking of the crazy situation in Syria, and more specifically\u00a0the requests by desperate Syrian\u00a0rebel\u00a0groups for advanced anti-aircraft weapons from the United States.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,71,72,153,67,66,70,15,69],"tags":[1004,1143,490,489,79,1005,426,1201,1199,1200,73,1202,919,876,76,298],"class_list":["post-970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conflict-2","category-conflict-resolution","category-international-relations","category-lordre-2","category-middle-east","category-politics-2","category-religious-violence","category-us","category-violence","tag-al-nusra","tag-assad-must-go","tag-assad-regime","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-isil","tag-moderate-rebels","tag-president-obama","tag-revolution","tag-russias-airstrikes","tag-russian-airstrikes","tag-syria","tag-syria-will-fall","tag-syrian-civil-war","tag-syrian-rebels","tag-terrorism","tag-vladimir-putin"],"yoast_head":"\nDouble-edged swords rattle over Russia's airstrikes - L'Ordre<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Russia's airstrikes in Syria have provoked irrational threats, and delusional references to the original Syrian "revolution" of 2011 as if it had succeeded.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/10\/double-edged-swords-rattle-over-russias-airstrikes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Double-edged swords rattle over Russia's airstrikes - L'Ordre\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Russia's airstrikes in Syria have provoked irrational threats, and delusional references to the original Syrian "revolution" of 2011 as if it had succeeded.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/10\/double-edged-swords-rattle-over-russias-airstrikes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"L'Ordre\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-10-03T23:44:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/files\/2015\/10\/Cartoon-double-edgedbsword.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Harry J. Bentham\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Double-edged swords rattle over Russia's airstrikes - L'Ordre","description":"Russia's airstrikes in Syria have provoked irrational threats, and delusional references to the original Syrian \"revolution\" of 2011 as if it had succeeded.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/10\/double-edged-swords-rattle-over-russias-airstrikes.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Double-edged swords rattle over Russia's airstrikes - L'Ordre","og_description":"Russia's airstrikes in Syria have provoked irrational threats, and delusional references to the original Syrian \"revolution\" of 2011 as if it had succeeded.","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/2015\/10\/double-edged-swords-rattle-over-russias-airstrikes.html","og_site_name":"L'Ordre","article_published_time":"2015-10-03T23:44:21+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/files\/2015\/10\/Cartoon-double-edgedbsword.png"}],"author":"Harry J. 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Bentham","description":"Harry J. Bentham is a British futurist blogger who has been a contributor at a number of think tanks including the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies since 2013. His work at Press TV and the L'Ordre blog featured at the multi-faith Beliefnet website has gained increasing attention and praise, including in the international media. Commentaries on political and ethical controversies by Bentham have been published at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, H+ Magazine, Dissident Voice and numerous other publications. He edits The clubof.info Blog (http:\/\/www.clubof.info\/search\/label\/Harry_J_Bentham).","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Harry-J.-Bentham\/e\/B00D4MSEY0\/"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/author\/hbentham"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/577"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=970"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":975,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions\/975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lordre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}