As a dictator develops, he may pass certain milestones in the way that any other criminal might. What starts with techniques for stealing elections, for example, gets on to a depth in corruption hard to reverse (once everyone’s on the take) — and then, later, more substantial crimes. Vladimir Putin may have launched and pursued his career along two tracks: one as the ultimate Bond villain, the Soviet, post-Soviet KGB thug — and he’s already got the nukes — and the other is his own figure in Russian history: how will he be remembered?
The farther down into the depths Syria goes, the more difficult Putin will find it to control his own reputation even as he rebuilds aspects of the Russian security state. He could intervene to temper the Assad regime with some kind of Russian ideological humanism lifted out of 19th Century aristocracy and agitation, but the Assad regime seems to have gone beyond rescue, imho, as has the ISIS part of the revolution, and such Russian medicine as may be applied may not be strong enough to reverse the damage done the state.
Incidentally, Putin evacuated Russian civilians from Syria, at least to the extent that they cared to leave (by air); he also pulled the naval presence from Tartus. That’s been part of the hands-off approach to Syria that has also made the battle space a political theater in which the worst of the worst really have shown their colors, somewhat diminished their own energies as well as assets in play, and brought inherent fault lines in the Arab world and in Islam into focus for the world to see.
A Putinesque intervention during Sochi would be glorious! 🙂 However, what does he have to work with, and what can he do with it? Syrians have needed what Egyptians have enjoyed: a protective and tractable army, not the one dropping barrel bombs on their heads. Take it further: they needed a mentality that would have gathered behind General Idris a malleable revolutionary army: instead, that bright idea has been flanked by the al-Qaeda affiliates and their remote sponsors.
If and as Russian web-based information culture expands, Putin’s reliance on image he can control will become more deeply challenged, but the so-called “fragile empire” has great backbone in the stolen billions of the energy business and use of the same to stoke corruption and patronage. Putin’s enjoying the winter games. He knows his kind of power, and, for now, he knows he’s got it and with it a fine image of himself along with the roaring adulation of his nationalist fans.
Inspiration: promotion of an article (which I’m not finding online) by Adnan Oktar encouraging Russian intervention in Syria.
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There is a struggle between America and Russia in Syria.! (Adnan Oktar) – YouTube – 2/3/2014
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Call it the “System of the Mahdi” or a thousand other things: essential humanism is the issue in Syria, and as noted here recently and implied in the top section, which was composed for a thread but is only posted here, Syrians have never known the possession of an army that stood for their interests.
What they have known and for three years experienced with increasing misery is a dictator’s army, Which has been the mighty instrument of their own subjugation.
With the revolutionary army partially, heavily, hijacked by the al-Qaeda affiliates, even if disaffiliated by al-Qaeda central, they’re trapped, and the reward for being defenseless is global hand wringing, UN humanitarian assistance, and neighborly emergency medical care in small portions — the injured or ill have to get to a border and across it — plus other assistance from (gasp!) Israel.
Syria is gone with several of its key cities destroyed and one-third to one-half of its population dispersed internally and externally.
Assad will not get it back, much less put it back the way it was.
Syrians, however, are not gone.
They will need to go home to their land and live different lives. God give them the army to do it, somehow, and give that army the prescience and wisdom to know and to separate true threats to Syrian freedom, when it comes, from the fabrications of fascist dictators.
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