DeYoung's colleague David Ignatius further elaborated on this new-old stratagem:
"Obama's desire for Russian cooperation is one reason he has been cautious in responding to allegations that Assad has used chemical weapons. Obama talked by phone to President Vladimir Putin Monday, and an official said 'we still do believe there's a constructive role for Russia to play.'"
One way to politicize intelligence is to purposefully slow the investigation of war crimes in order to wield soft power leverage with a diplomatic adversary. (What price asphyxiated Arabs against the priority of the 'reset'?) Such thinking also shows how tenaciously committed the administration is to misreading intransigent regimes that have tried in vain to make their positions clear to the West.
The Putinists believe that all of Syria's rebels are terrorists. Threatening to arm those rebels is thus not likely to change the Putinists' view of the matter. The Russian Foreign Ministry has in the past blamed atrocities carried out by Assadist proxies, such as the Houla massacre, on the opposition. Most recently, Russia has facilitated and seconded the regime's propaganda about the supposed origin of a chemical attack in Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, by objecting to the U.N.'s demand for a forensic investigation that encompasses all of the targeted sites including those in Homs and Damascus. This suggests that the Russians, too, want to convince the world that it wasn't the regime that used sarin gas but its enemies - an allegation that would backfire if Obama took his own red line more seriously.
I almost felt sorry for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who once again finds himself having to beg to be understood. In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, he expressed himself "gratified" to discover that it was the Americans and Europeans who were the ones quietly unspooling their old preconditions about not engaging in "dialogue" with Assad. Lavrov also reaffirmed Russia's right to deliver anti-aircraft weapons and other lethal hardware to Syria and described his imminent visitor Kerry as "pragmatic," which is the same word Assad used to complimentarily characterize the United States's approach to his country as a whole.
What must the poor Russians do to show that they intend to play a destructive role in America's Syria policy? And what must it take for President Obama to realize that he's got as much international support on resolving the Syria crisis as he is ever going to get?
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Many people otherwise sympathetic to what's happening in this luckless country believe that it's simply too late to do anything substantive because the opposition has been too 'radicalized' to ever possibly accept U.S. assistance in good faith. Jabhat al-Nusra has pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda and Ayman al-Zawahiri (then un-pledged it, but whatever), and they're not even the largest franchise among Salafist-jihadist groups. Even if Obama did decide to run guns to the rebels, wouldn't he be enabling the nasties who want to wage sectarian holy war and then turn their attention to America when they're done?
Unfortunately, because we waited so long, 'blowback' is a more likely unintended consequence than it was a year ago and it is simply not possible to ensure that all weapons imported into Syria will stay out of the hands of the jihadists. Many of the Croatian arms have already found their way to Jabhat al-Nusra. (A way around this, of course, is to deny the rebels the heavy-duty hardware - namely anti-aircraft munitions - and instead do the work of neutralizing the regime's air power for them through some combination of aircraft and stand-off mechanisms.)
All this to one side, the administration's other stated objective of trying to put some "more skin in the game" by arming rebels is not so quixotic. Without overstating the case, there are still moderates within the ranks of the opposition, even if some have technically joined up with extremist elements. In many instances, "Islamists" make themselves known only when they believe that paymasters in Doha or Riyadh might be watching.
