Commentary: Putin is in a quagmire in Syria — and Russians deserve better
By Richard C. Longworth
In the late winter of 2003, a Russian television pundit named Alexei Pushkov told me why President George W. Bush‘s planned invasion of Iraq would end badly.
“It’s a huge over-estimation of your power, unless you want to become a rogue superpower,” Pushkov said. “It’s a trap. Bush can’t back off. He can’t bring troops back or he’s finished. So the war becomes an issue of American domestic politics. It’s the only program he has.”
Today, Pushkov is a nationalistic leader of the Russian parliament and one of PresidentVladimir Putin‘s closest allies. He got America’s misadventure in Iraq right, of course, but his critique then applies just as well now to Putin’s head-first dive into Syria.
Putin’s Russia is in a quagmire in Syria, for the same reason Bush’s America landed in a decadelong quagmire in Iraq: Neither knew the territory. There are some parts of the world that the U.S. and Russia are equipped to understand, but the Middle East — especially chaotic Syria — isn’t one of them.
We assumed Iraqis would greet us with open arms and rose petals because we got rid of Saddam Hussein for them. We were wrong, to say the least.
Putin apparently thinks a few Russian airstrikes in Syria will end the civil war against President Bashar Assad and rout the Islamic State. When he learns he’s wrong, he’ll be tempted to throw ground troops into the mix, creating the political trap that Pushkov foresaw for Bush.
For varying reasons, both America and Russia have a knack of stumbling blindly into foreign briar patches that other nations wisely avoid.
America’s critics, at home and abroad, see it gripped by a messianic exceptionalism, a sort of manifest destiny to solve all the world’s problems and replace them with the blessings of The American Way. Nearly two centuries ago, John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and we’ve been ignoring this advice ever since.
Russia has the same itch to meddle, but for different reasons.
One is Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet superpower and his dream of making Russia great again. Another is defensive: Russia, often invaded, truly fears the surrounding world. This is why it set up its protective ring of East European satellites during the Cold War. It invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a friendly president on the southern Soviet flank. Now it’s bombing Syria to help another friendly president, Assad, in its near abroad.
But after years of living and working in Russia, I see another reason, and that’s incompetence.
The Russian people — warm, sensual, funny, immensely gifted in music and literature — deserve better governments than they’ve ever had. Instead, from czar to commissar to democrat to autocrat, they’ve been given centuries of incompetence that has left this vast, rich nation in poverty and repression.
The same incompetence reigns in foreign affairs. It was Soviet ineptness, not President Ronald Reagan’s lectures, that ended the Cold War. The Afghanistan adventure may have driven the last nail in the Soviet coffin. (The U.S. helped with its aid to the Afghan mujahedin who, after routing the Soviets, morphed into the Taliban, proving that Moscow may not have a corner on incompetence.)
Today, Putin’s troops are bogged down in eastern Ukraine, while the Western sanctions against his Ukraine policy are choking his economy. In response, Putin has doubled his bets by plunging into Syria.
So far, the Russian people seem to like this derring-do. This won’t last. Countries without a free press develop good grapevines. When the body bags began coming back from Afghanistan, popular support for that war vanished. It won’t take many incidents like the apparent bombing of the Russian airliner from Egypt to do the same thing to Putin’s popularity that Iraq did to Bush’s ratings.
American hawks see Putin as a master strategist running rings around the more cautiousBarack Obama. The truth is the opposite. Putin is a tactician, not a strategist, and his whole foreign policy amounts to one blunder after another. Obama, already more committed than he wants, should sit back and let Putin defeat himself.
Obama’s critics say his caution undermines America’s “credibility” with its allies. This was the same argument that hawks used to escalate the Vietnam War — that a pullout would destroy U.S. credibility and lead to a communist takeover of all Southeast Asia — a falling of the dominoes. In the end, the pullout from a misguided war actually restored U.S. credibility, and no dominoes fell.
Now Putin is undermining Russia’s role in the world, by proving that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Twelve years ago, Pushkov saw an aggressive trend in American policy, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq — “a trend to use indiscriminate military power to gain political goals.” He would be a true pal to Putin by aiming the same analysis today at the Kremlin itself.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE