Saturday, October 03, 2015

Interest in conflict reveals a conflict of interest


The US and Russia are in talks to lay out the ground rules for bombing the shit out of those they don't like in Syria. The definition of who they don't like, what some may call terrorists, has proved to be a problem.
While they confer about “de-conflicting” their bombing raids in Syria, U.S. and Russian military officials also might want to discuss what the word “terrorist” means.

That would be an easier discussion for the Russians, who began conducting airstrikes Wednesday, than the Americans, who’ve been bombing Syria for more than a year.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals, the definition of “terrorist,” when it comes to the increasingly turbulent Syrian civil war, is simple: anyone who uses violence to try to topple President Bashar Assad.

Assad is a dictator, but he’s Moscow’s dictator. Just as the late Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was Washington’s dictator, for decades, before President George W. Bush turned against him and launched an ill-fated March 2003 invasion whose consequences are still playing out more than a dozen years later across the Middle East, from Syria and Iraq to Libya and Iran.

For President Barack Obama and his top military aides, it’s becoming more complicated by the day to say just who is a terrorist in Syria.

Like Moscow, Washington views some of the anti-Assad forces as terrorists, starting with the Islamic State militants.

But the United States’ uneasy alliances with Turkey and the elusive “moderate opposition groups” in Syria, along with the reluctance of Obama and Congress to get drawn further into that nation’s bloody disaster, require American leaders to engage in verbal jujitsu when asked if the U.S.-led air campaign is also targeting the Nusra Front, Ahrar al Shram and other al Qaida-linked groups.
With the two countries working towards totally different end-games, the killing in Syria may come down to whoever is the last man standing. But he better duck and run because whichever country ends up on the losing side will probably drop a congratulatory 500 lb. bomb on him.

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