Putin Orders Start of Russian Forces' Withdrawal from Syria

Question Set No. 1:

Via his actions in Ukraine and Syria, has Putin achieved his aim of:

a. Containing the spread of Western revolution in these regions? And of, thereby,

b. Preventing the U.S./the West from gaining greater power, influence and control in Russia's backyard/Russia's sphere of interest?

Question Set No. 2:

Likewise, and as part of larger strategies (known today, as they were yesterday, as "containment" and "roll back"), has Russia's use of such things as hybrid warfare (for example in Ukraine) and its use of air power (for example in Syria); have these approaches:

a. Allowed that Russia might (continue to) carry out an open-ended competition against the U.S./the West? And have these such approaches, likewise,

b. Allowed Russia to signal to the U.S./the West -- and indeed to the rest of the world -- that the value of protecting its (Russia's) own backyard -- and the value of protecting its (Russia's) own sphere of interest -- this is greater than any opponent’s interest in upsetting same?

Question Set No. 3:

Thus, and specifically re: this "mission accomplished"/"mission success" point-of-view, to understand why Putin might order the withdrawal of certain forces from Syria now?

Outlaw,

I was wondering what are the odds that the Kremlin meeting btw ‘Bare- Chested Idiot on a White Horse ' and the Big Hats went along the lines of if he doesn’t remove the Russian Army from Syria the Big Hats will remove him, and the horse he rode in on, from the Kremlin?

RC

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/16/11244980/obama-syria-policy

Why President Obama sold out his own foreign policy doctrine in Syria

Updated by Jeremy Shapiro on March 16, 2016,

For foreign policy wonks, a 20,000-word interview with the sitting president on his foreign policy doctrine, like the one Jeffrey Goldberg published last week in the Atlantic, is a rare and delicious treat. We will be masticating it, in all of its glorious philosophical complexity, for months, probably years, to come.

But as Max Fisher pointed out, the immediate debate in the Washington policy community quickly reduced to what has become the central question of Obama’s foreign policy: "Was the president right or wrong to decline a military intervention in Syria?"

There is just one problem with this question: The United States did intervene in Syria.

Even though the president's own foreign policy doctrine of non-intervention in Middle Eastern civil wars clearly advises against just such an intervention, he nonetheless took various half-measures that, collectively, have deeply involved the United States in Syria, helped inspire counter-escalations by Iran and Russia, and threaten to involve the US further in the Syrian civil war.

In other words, Obama effectively compromised on his own doctrine. But why?

It turns out that while a president's philosophy does matter somewhat, bitter domestic politics, bureaucratic pressures, and what the president derisively referred to as the "Washington playbook" — the set of standard Washington responses to international crises — will have a powerful effect on any president's foreign policy.

The larger lesson of America’s screwed-up Syria policy is not that American inactivity produced chaos or that American meddling made a bad situation worse. It is that the Washington sausage factory tends to produce an incoherent foreign policy that satisfies no one, regardless of what the president thinks.

Intervention by another name would be just as harsh

The fact of US intervention in Syria is not really a debatable point — despite the endless hand-wringing over US inactivity. According to the New York Times, the United States has since at least early 2013 been providing military equipment, weapons, and training to armed Syrian rebel groups actively seeking to overthrow the Assad regime.

This meets any legal or commonsense definition of intervention.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin were to send anti-tank weapons to militias in the Pacific Northwest seeking the overthrow of the US government, there would not be much debate as to whether that constituted military intervention. It would rightly be seen as an act of war.

One can argue over whether US intervention in Syria was too little or too much, done poorly or done well, but not about whether it has happened.

To be fair, it is not just the critics who elide this point. The president does, too. In the Atlantic interview, Obama outlines a broad philosophy of non-intervention in Middle Eastern civil wars. He seems intent on providing a coherent answer to his critics’ charges that he has failed to act in Syria. He claims that getting involved in Syria would have bogged down the United States in yet another Middle Eastern quagmire and eroded American power, while failing to create stability. He rightly dismisses the claims of the Washington policy community that a failure to intervene in Syria reduces America’s credibility and emboldens America’s enemies.

Obama has long made a habit of outlining a broad approach of masterly inactivity in Syria and then hedging against his own strategy

Thus, for example, in September 2015 we learned that the US train-and-equip program had only trained a handful of Syrian rebels. But when the Russian airstrikes began later that month they somehow managed to find "more than enough US-supported rebels to bomb."

But if the level of US involvement in Syria went somewhat unnoticed in Washington, it certainly didn't go unnoticed in Moscow (though the Russians often failed to distinguish between US intervention and intervention by US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey).

Last summer, as the Assad regime teetered on the brink of defeat under the assault of rebel groups, many backed by the US and its allies, Russia (and Iran) did what Obama’s own analysis predicted they would: They counter-escalated, and Russia began airstrikes aimed at preventing yet another US-sponsored regime change in the Middle East.

In this context, it hardly makes sense to endlessly debate whether the United States should have intervened in Syria. It did intervene. The more important question is why didn’t the president have the courage of his own convictions? Why has he consistently taken half-measures in Syria that accord with no one’s best policy recommendation, including, by the evidence of the Atlantic article, his own?

The dirty little secret of the American presidency

The answer goes some way to understanding just how hard it is to actually follow a coherent foreign policy philosophy in Washington. The dirty little secret of the American presidency is that it is not as powerful as it appears, even in foreign affairs.

The key reason is that an American president cannot, as many other leaders can, simply admit that there is nothing the United States can do about an urgent international problem dominating the headlines. After all, the US is a "can do" country with more military power than strategic sense. This spirit of action has helped make America the richest, most powerful country on Earth, but it has also gotten it into a lot of stupid wars.

The "Washington playbook" provides a menu of prefabricated solutions to such situations, most of which rely on America's unique military capacity. They range from shipping arms to training local armies to simply imposing peace through the application of superior force. None of them involves standing aside.

In the case of Syria, none of these proposals made much sense according to the president's own philosophy. But because each had a past example of supposed success, each had adherents among the eternal optimists of military force in Washington think tanks, and each had its echoes in the press. Importantly, each also had a huge rhetorical advantage over doing nothing.

With such proposals dominating the headlines, it is simply not politically viable for the president to admit that he is powerless. But it's not just that it's hard for a president to wake up every morning to allied leaders, opposition politicians, and newspaper headlines declaring that he is feckless and weak. It's also that those headlines begin to erode his popularity and threaten his capacity to deliver on other parts of his political agenda.

This becomes even more difficult as disagreements within your administration leak into the press and provide ammunition for the idea that the problem is the president's personal lack of resolve or decisiveness.

Accordingly, at every stage of the Syrian crisis — when the Assad regime began firing on peaceful protesters in 2011, when it began its brutal air campaign against Syrian rebels in 2012, when it used chemical weapons in the Damascus suburbs in 2013, when ISIS took Mosul in 2014, and when the Russians intervened in force in 2015 — the political pressure on President Obama to "do something" grew.

Responding to that pressure, Obama sought at each stage to split the difference: to respond to the crisis while remaining true to his philosophy and keeping US involvement to a minimum. I took to calling this practice, somewhat indelicately, "salami-slicing the baby." As one US official put it during the response to the September 2013 Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the White House sought a response that was "just muscular enough not to get mocked."

This approach was perhaps most evident in the White House’s reaction to the revelation in September 2015 that the US military’s train-and-equip mission in Syria, intended to train 5,400 Syrian opposition soldiers in the first year, had been a complete failure: The program had only produced four or five in the first year.

It is simply not politically viable for the president to admit that he is powerless

In briefings after the disclosure, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest suggested that the president had never supported the program. To the contrary, he explained, the entire reason for the program was to placate critics of the administration’s Syria policy. "Many of our critics had proposed this specific option as essentially the cure-all for all of the policy challenges that we're facing in Syria right now," Earnest said. "That is not something that this administration ever believed, but it is something that our critics will have to answer for."

The result of this salami slicing has been a long, slow ride down a slippery slope toward ever-greater US involvement in Syria. If the current cessation of hostilities breaks down, that ride will likely continue, perhaps under a new president not so philosophically inclined.

The curious case of US Syria policy

This all means that the story of US policy in Syria is not a story of a president inspired by an ideology of restraint standing aside, for better or for worse, when he could have acted.

To the contrary, it is a story of a president pushed by domestic politics and overly optimistic schemes into interventionist half-measures that he didn't believe in and that satisfied no one.

The lesson is that even a president who has shown extraordinary awareness that the "Washington playbook" frequently dictates unwise military interventions often feels forced to compromise his policy. A foreign policy philosophy is great, and an Atlantic article outlining it is even better. It will likely launch a thousand dissertations. But just because a president has a philosophy doesn’t mean he gets to implement it.

My thoughts below offered for consideration. Herein, I am (a) borrowing liberally from the language and rationale of the "War on Rocks" item entitled: "America Did Hybrid Warfare Too," (b) adapting same to my New/Reverse Cold War thesis and our present-day cases and (c) using these to explain, for example, why Russian main body forces might begin withdrawing from Syria at the present time:

BEGIN

The purpose of all this (interventions in Ukraine and Syria)?

Defending Russia from hostile foreign interference — the Monroe Doctrine --Russia's such version.

But above all it served to demonstrate that Russia had revitalized its will to oppose the United States/the West in the New/Reverse Cold War of today.

Objectively, Russia did achieve its aims (this explaining why Russia might begin withdrawal of certain of its various forces); specifically, of containing the spread of Western revolution in these regions, and of preventing the U.S./the West from, thereby, gaining greater power, influence and control in Russia's backyard/its sphere of interest.

Employed as part of a broader strategy (known today, as it was yesterday, as "containment" and "roll back"), what Russia's use of hybrid warfare (in Ukraine) and its use primarily of air forces (in Syria) did was to allow Russia to carry out open-ended competition against the U.S./the West, and to allow Russia to signal to the U.S./the West -- and indeed to the rest of the world -- that the value of protecting its (Russia's) own backyard -- and its own sphere of interest -- was greater than any opponent’s interest in upsetting it.

END

( Should you wish to read the referenced/paraphrased "War on the Rocks" article, it is provided here: http://warontherocks.com/2015/04/america-did-hybrid-warfare-too/ )

Carl Bildt
✔ ‎@carlbildt Moscow abuzz tonight with theories on Syria partial withdrawal.
One: economy has made deal with Saudi over Syria and oil prices necessary.

Carl Bildt
✔ ‎@carlbildt Russian partial Syria withdrawal said to be “coordinated” with Damascus. For certain. Brotherhood, love, understanding and harmony.

Notice western MSM and Obama WH did not mention anything about this did they.......?????

Is it possible that the MANPAD shot down of the Assad MiG was a not so subtle warning to the Russians ......????

What is interesting is that the video crazy FSA somehow just did not video the actual shot down especially using a MANPAD as if they wanted to protect the launch team......if you noticed all the initial reporting was around the AA smokescreen videos.....and shortly before the use of the MANPAD there was on the net a report of possible North Korean MANPADs in Syria with emphasis on the fact they were capable to hitting all Russian aircraft that were flying in Syria......

THEN if we look back over the last week the KSA FM stated just before the ending of the Northern Thunder global Sunni Army exercise he stated the KSA had a plan for the total removal of Assad one way or the other...so were the MANPADs the "other"....?

Since the release of the Obama Doctrine the KSA was free to do what they wanted to as Obama had basically written them off which would explain why the GCC sent in the MANPADS...Obama has no further influence over them and that Putin was smart enough to see.

Putin orders withdrawal from Syria after being told of gulf states decision to ship anti-aircraft systems to rebels over west objections

Gulf states started sending in manpads and support teams to Syrian rebels weeks ago.

WAS AFG sitting deep in Putin's calculations if his so called glorious highly successful AF started getting shot out of the sky...not so good for follow on weapon sales.......

So actually Putin was never interested in attacking Islamic State as he stated in his press conference shortly before his actual speech at the UNGA where he stated he was going into Syria to destroy Islamic State.....

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to start the withdrawal of forces from Syria starting Tuesday. Russia will however keep a military presence at the port of Tartous and at the Khmeimim airbase.

“I consider the objectives that have been set for the Defense Ministry to be generally accomplished. That is why I order to start withdrawal of the main part of our military group from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic starting from tomorrow,” Putin said on Monday during a meeting with Shoigu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

To control the observation of ceasefire agreements in the region, Moscow will keep its Khmeimim airbase in Latakia province and a base at the port of Tartous, Putin said.

At Moscow's initiative, a phone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Syria's President Bashar Assad was held on Monday evening, the Kremlin reported.

The two leaders agreed that the actions of Russia's Air Force in Syria have allowed them to "profoundly reverse the situation" in connection to fighting terrorists in the region, having "disorganized militants' infrastructure and inflicted fundamental damage upon them."

Bashar Assad has recognized the “professionalism, courage and heroism” of Russian Army soldiers and officers, who have taken part in the military action, thanking Russia not only for extensive help in the fight against terrorism, but also for providing humanitarian aid and assistance to the Syrian civilian population.

The Syrian leader also stressed its readiness to engage in the political process in Syria as soon as possible, the Kremlin said.

Russia's president also addressed his foreign minister. He had tasked Lavrov with intensifying Russia's participation in the peace process to solve the Syrian crisis, the Kremlin reported.

So did Putin and the Russian/Iranian and Assad militaries defeat Islamic State which is what Putin stated in the UNGA he was going to Syria to in fact do.....

So Russia defeated Islamic Sate.......?????.

So is this the Putin/Obama declared "Mission Accomplished" statement over Islamic State.....????