Syria: Obama's Bay of Pigs

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Rebel forces, secretly armed and trained by the CIA, attempt to overthrow a brutal dictator despised and vilified by Washington. Hit by devastating airstrikes, the rebels put out a frantic call for American help.

Sounds like the latest reports from Syria, where Russian planes have been attacking rebel forces including groups backed by the CIA, and rebel commanders are pleading for aid from the U.S.

It also sounds like a tragic drama that played out more than half a century ago, at Cuba's Bay of Pigs.

Remember the Bay of Pigs, back in April 17, 1961, when some 1400 Cubans, secretly armed and trained by the CIA, stormed ashore at Cuba's Bahia de Cochinos and were immediately bloodied by Castro's small air force. They desperately appealed to their U.S. backers for help. But President John Kennedy, who had inherited the operation from the Eisenhower administration, refused to provide air cover. He was afraid of being drawn into a very bloody and embarrassing war that, as he saw it, could only damage America's interests at home and abroad.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barry-lando/syriaobamas-bay-of-pigs_b_8232344.html

I was thinking today, when Putin bombs the shit out of the jihadis, where will they retreat to? Turkey? Saudi? Jordan? They better seal their borders fast.

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1. Or it could be Putin's Vietnam. nt

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2. For the record I don't find that one convincing.

Mostly I like to point out the continuing and egregious failures of our spooks, but the analogy made there does not hold up, in my mind anyway.

I have to see how deep Putin decides to jump in before deciding whether it will be his Vietnam. Chechnya was sort of a Vietnam for him, but he found a solution, a political solution, he hired a client despot and gave him all he wanted.

But anyway, to have a Vietnam, you have to be stubborn, keep plugging for a decade or two, that's how you bankrupt countries. It seems unlikely that Putin would ever give up on his Alawite bastion, but he does not need to hold all that much and it is defensible with the means he has, I think.

But he is making some bets about what the surrounding crazies will do too, he is not the only one who has a say.

And much depends, as I said, on the quality of Russian arms, whch will be tested. Putin will want to show their stuff to good advantage; if you read in the Russian press, they have a marketing campaign going.

Edit: but we really ought to butt out at this point, we have "done enough", if you see what I mean.

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3. always easier getting in than getting out, external powers still seem to think

they're qualified to draw boundaries in the middle east.

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4. It is always so much easier to figure out what someone else ought to do. nt

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5. in this case, not so easy to figure out as to blurt out nonsense about no fly zones and standing

up to Putin.

Personally, I wouldn't discount the possibility that Obama was trying to goad Putin into doing this with his "regional power" jabs.

ISIS gets bombed, and Russia gets the blowback.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/syrian-rebel-groups-unite-to-fight-russian-occupiers/

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6. They both play deep games at times, I couldn't begin to unravel it, however I do think

the antagonism between them is somewhere between exaggerated and pretense. They don't seem simpatico but I don't see either one of them being stupid, and getting personal in international affairs is always stupid.

Putin likes to rub it in, but vendettas are very un-Obama-like. He is not above letting you screw yourself, but he will warn you about it.

Watching what other people do is much easier and more informative than trying to figure out what they think.

If you want to know what people think you have to listen to what they say, and then frame it as either: what they want you to think, or what they think you want them to think, not what they really think. Nobody says what they really think, most of the time.

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7. Saudi Clerics Call for Jihad Against Syrian Government, Russia, Iran

Here you go.

Dozens of Islamist Saudi Arabian clerics have called on Arab and Muslim countries to "give all moral, material, political and military" support to what they term a jihad, or holy war, against Syria's government and its Iranian and Russian backers.

Although the clerics who signed the online statement are not affiliated with the government, their strong sectarian and anti-Christian language reflects mounting anger among many Saudis over Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria's civil war.

Russia last week started airstrikes against Syrian opposition targets that it describes as aimed at weakening the jihadist Islamic State group, a move Riyadh has denounced. The clerics' statement compared it to the Soviet Union's 1980 invasion of Afghanistan, which prompted an international jihad.

"The holy warriors of Syria are defending the whole Islamic nation. Trust them and support them … because if they are defeated, God forbid, it will be the turn of one Sunni country after another," the statement said.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/saudi-clerics-call-for-jihad-against-syrian-government-russia-iran/537207.html

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9. Both Putin and the clerics get their culture war. nt

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10. Could be.

All sorts of people are offering to jump in and help on both sides.

Edit: Pedal to the metal, for a while, a lot of these guys can't really afford to be seen to back off.

We really should stay out of it.

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11. Include us out nt

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8. Syrian insurgent groups vow to attack Russian forces in rare show of unity

More than 40 Syrian insurgent groups have vowed to attack Russian forces in retaliation for Moscow’s air campaign, in a show of unity among the usually fragmented rebels against what they called the “occupiers” of Syria.

The 41 groups, which included powerful factions such as Ahrar al-Sham, Islam Army and the Levant Front, said Russia joined the war in Syria after president Bashar Assad’s forces were on the verge “of a crushing defeat”.

Russia launched its air campaign on Wednesday and claims it is targeting the Islamic State group and al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front. But many of the strikes appear to have hit Western-backed rebel factions.

The Russian attacks have largely focused on the northwestern and central provinces – the gateways to the heartland of Assad’s powerbase in the capital, Damascus, and on the Mediterranean coast.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/syrian-insurgent-groups-vow-to-attack-russian-forces

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12. With things quieting down in E. Ukraine, the Azov battalion has some time on its hands nt

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13. There you go. There are war groupies everywhere.

Maybe we can have some Kadryovsks and some Azov guys get their greatest wish.

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14. Believe it when you see it, not one moment before

"Unity" is not a word in the Middle East.

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15. Me neither.

They are armed gangs, pretty much.

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16. There's the traditional tribe structure, which is dying out

giving birth to the gangs of landless, unemployed, unmarried, uneducated young men with nothing better to do with their religious nutcase leaders.

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17. Yep. Who could have seen that coming? nt

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18. Obama's Syria critics ignore inconvenient facts

It is fashionable to criticise Washington's approach to the Syrian civil war. In his memoir, former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described President Obama's approach to Syria and Iraq as flawed. Obama has been roundly criticised for his 'tentative' approach to Syria. A piece on this site last week referred to the bankruptcy of US policy in the region. Even Australian pundits such as Greg Sheridan have said that 'for the last few years nothing has been all that Obama has offered.'

Now the Russians' apparent decisiveness in deploying a modest strike force to its decades-old ally Syria has led people to claim Obama has been outmanoeuvred by Putin. But this same argument was leveled against Obama more than two years ago. It also ignores the fact that the Syria problem has always been more straightforward for Moscow than for Washington. For Russia there is simply the Assad regime and those opposed to the Assad regime. Moscow's only real question has been the degree and timing of its support to Assad.

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Added to that is the plethora of state and non-state actors with their fingers in the Syrian pie, and over whom Washington has little if any influence. And as for those who see arming the various opposition forces as some sort of panacea to Syria's troubles, Obama had this to say:

Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn't come up with much. We have looked at this from every angle. And the truth is that the challenge there has been, and continues to be, that you have an authoritarian, brutal government who is willing to do anything to hang on to power, and you have an opposition that is disorganized, ill-equipped, ill-trained, and is self-divided. All of that is on top of some of the sectarian divisions...And, in that environment, our best chance of seeing a decent outcome at this point is to work the state actors who have invested so much in keeping Assad in power—mainly the Iranians and the Russians—as well as working with those who have been financing the opposition to make sure that they're not creating the kind of extremist force that we saw emerge out of Afghanistan when we were financing the mujahideen.

http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2015/10/06/Obamas-Syria-critics-ignore-inconvenient-facts.aspx

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19. that stretch wins the taffy pull prize