Even uglier is the lack of any sympathy or outrage over the terrorist bombing that killed 224 innocent people, mostly tourists, aboard a Russian charter flight in Egypt. If the victims had been American and a similar callous reaction had come from President Putin and a columnist for a major Russian newspaper, one can only imagine the outrage. However, in Official Washington, any recognition of a common humanity with Russians makes you a "Moscow stooge."
The other wacky part of both Obama's comments and Friedman's echoes of the same themes is this quick assessment that the Russian intervention in support of the Syrian government has been some abject failure -- as if the U.S.-led coalition has been doing so wonderfully.
First, as a "fair-minded" reporter, I would say that it appears the Russian-backed Syrian offensive has at least stopped the advances of the Islamic State, Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and its jihadist allies, including Ahrar al-Sham (which technically separates itself from Al Qaeda and thus qualifies for U.S.-supplied weaponry even though it fights side-by-side with Nusra in the Saudi-backed Army of Conquest).
The Afghan Memories
Obama's reference to Afghanistan was also startling. He was suggesting that Putin should have learned a lesson from Moscow's intervention in the 1980s in support of a secular, pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, which came under attack by CIA-organized-and-armed Islamic jihadists known then as mujahedeen.
Wielding sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and benefiting from $1 billion a year in Saudi-U.S.-supplied weapons, the Afghan fundamentalist mujahedeen and their allies, including Saudi Osama bin Laden, eventually drove Soviet troops out in 1989 and -- several years later behind the Taliban -- completed the reversion of Afghanistan back to the Seventh Century. Women in Kabul went from dressing any way they liked in public, including wearing mini-skirts, to being covered in chadors and kept at home.
Obama's bringing up Afghanistan in the Syrian context and Putin's supposed one-month Syrian failure was ironic in another way. After Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of bin Laden and has been bogged down in a quagmire there for 14 years, including nearly seven years under Obama.
So, Obama may not be on the firmest ground when he suggests that Putin recall Moscow's experience in Afghanistan a few decades ago. After all, Obama has many more recent memories.
Further, what is different about Putin's Syrian strategy -- compared with Obama's -- is that the Russians are targeting all the terrorists and jihadists, not just the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh). While U.S. propaganda tries to present the non-ISIS jihadists as "moderates" (somehow pretending that Al Qaeda is no longer a terrorist organization), there is, in reality, very little distinction between ISIS and the alliance of Nusra/Ahrar al-Sham.
And, as for Official Washington's new "group think" about the Syrian government's lack of progress in the war, there is the discordant news that the last of rebel forces have agreed to abandon the central city of Homs, which had been dubbed the "capital of the revolution." The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that "thousands of insurgents will leave the last opposition-held neighborhood in" Homs, with the withdrawal beginning next week.
Al-Jazeera added the additional fact that the remaining 4,000 insurgents are "from al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham and the Free Syrian Army." In other words, the "moderate" Free Syrian Army was operating in collusion with Al Qaeda's affiliate and its major jihadist partner.
While it's hard to get reliable up-to-date information from inside Syria, one intelligence source familiar with the military situation told me that the Syrian government offensive, backed by Iranian troops and Russian air power, had been surprisingly successful in putting the jihadists, including ISIS and Nusra, on the defensive, with additional gains around the key city of Aleppo.
The Belated Oil Bombings
Also, in the past week, Putin shamed Obama into joining in a bombing operation to destroy hundreds of trucks carrying ISIS oil to Turkey. Why that valuable business was allowed to continue during the U.S.-led war on ISIS since summer 2014 has not been adequately explained. It apparently was being protected by Turkish President Erdogan.
Another irony of Obama's (and Friedman's) critical assessment of Putin's one-month military campaign came in Obama's recounting of his meeting during the Paris climate summit with Erdogan. Obama said he was still appealing to Erdogan to close the Turkish-Syrian border although radical jihadists have been crossing it since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
"With respect to Turkey, I have had repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the border between Turkey and Syria," Obama said. "We've seen some serious progress on that front, but there are still some gaps. In particular, there's about 98 kilometers that are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities."
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