The immediate prospect for significant improvement in U.S.-Russia relations now depends on something tangible: Will the forces that sabotaged previous ceasefire agreements in Syria succeed in doing so again, all the better to keep alive the \u201cregime change\u201d dreams of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists?<\/p>\n
Or will President Trump succeed where President Obama failed by bringing the U.S. military and intelligence bureaucracies into line behind a cease-fire rather than allowing insubordination to win out?<\/p>\n
These are truly life-or-death questions for the Syrian people and could have profound repercussions across Europe, which has been destabilized by the flood of refugees fleeing the horrific violence in the six-year proxy war that has ripped Syria apart.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But you would have little inkling of this important priority from the large page-one headlines Saturday morning in the US mainstream media, which continued its long obsession with the more ephemeral question of whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would confess to the sin of \u201cinterference\u201d in the 2016 US election and promise to repent.<\/p>\n
Thus, the headlines: \u201cTrump, Putin talk election interference\u201d (Washington Post<\/em>) and \u201cTrump asks Putin About Meddling During Election\u201d (New York Times<\/em>). There was also the expected harrumphing from commentators on CNN and MSNBC when Putin dared to deny that Russia had interfered.<\/p>\n In both the big newspapers and on cable news shows, the potential for a ceasefire in southern Syria \u2013 set to go into effect on Sunday \u2013 got decidedly second billing.<\/p>\n Yet, the key to Putin\u2019s assessment of Donald Trump is whether the US President is strong enough to make the mutually agreed-upon ceasefire stick. As Putin is well aware, to do so Trump will have to take on the same \u201cdeep-state\u201d forces that cheerily scuttled similar agreements in the past. In other words, the actuarial tables for this cease-fire are not good; long life for the agreement will take something just short of a miracle.<\/p>\n Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have to face down hardliners in both the Pentagon and CIA. Tillerson probably expects that Defense Secretary James \u201cMad-Dog\u201d Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo will cooperate by ordering their troops and operatives inside Syria to restrain the U.S.-backed \u201cmoderate rebels.\u201d<\/p>\n But it remains to be seen if Mattis and Pompeo can control the forces their agencies have unleashed in Syria. If recent history is any guide, it would be folly to rule out another \u201caccidental\u201d US bombing of Syrian government troops or a well-publicized \u201cchemical attack\u201d or some other senseless \u201cwar crime\u201d that social media and mainstream media will immediately blame on President Bashar al-Assad.<\/p>\n Bitter Experience<\/strong><\/p>\n Last fall\u2019s limited ceasefire in Syria, painstakingly worked out over 11 months by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and approved personally by Presidents Obama and Putin, lasted only five days (from Sept. 12-17) before it was scuttled by \u201ccoalition\u201d air strikes on well-known, fixed Syrian army positions, which killed between 64 and 84 Syrian troops and wounded about 100 others.<\/p>\n In public remarks bordering on the insubordinate, senior Pentagon officials a few days before the air attack on Sept. 17, showed unusually open skepticism regarding key aspects of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement \u2013 like sharing intelligence with the Russians (an important provision of the deal approved by both Obama and Putin).<\/p>\n The Pentagon\u2019s resistance and the \u201caccidental\u201d bombing of Syrian troops brought these uncharacteristically blunt words from Foreign Minister Lavrov on Russian TV on Sept. 26:<\/p>\n \u201cMy good friend John Kerry \u2026 is under fierce criticism from the US military machine. Despite the fact that, as always, [they] made assurances that the US Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama, supported him in his contacts with Russia \u2026 apparently the military does not really listen to the Commander in Chief.\u201d<\/p>\n Lavrov\u2019s specifically criticized Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Gen. Joseph Dunford for telling Congress that he opposed sharing intelligence with Russia despite the fact, as Lavrov put it, \u201cthe agreements concluded on direct orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama [who] stipulated that they would share intelligence.\u201d Noting this resistance inside the US military bureaucracy, Lavrov added, \u201cIt is difficult to work with such partners.\u201d<\/p>\n Putin picked up on the theme of insubordination in an Oct. 27 speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club, in which he openly lamented:<\/p>\n “My personal agreements with the President of the United States have not produced results\u2026 people in Washington are ready to do everything possible to prevent these agreements from being implemented in practice.”<\/p>\n On Syria, Putin decried the lack of a “common front against terrorism after such lengthy negotiations, enormous effort, and difficult compromises.”<\/p>\n Lavrov\u2019s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, meanwhile, even expressed sympathy for Kerry\u2019s quixotic effort, giving him an \u201cA\u201d for effort.<\/p>\n After then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter dispatched U.S. warplanes to provide an early death to the cease-fire so painstakingly worked out by Kerry and Lavrov for almost a year.<\/p>\n For his part, Kerry expressed regret \u2013 in words reflecting the hapless hubris befitting the chief envoy of the world\u2019s \u201conly indispensable\u201d country \u2013 conceding that he had been unable to \u201calign\u201d all the forces in play.<\/p>\n With the ceasefire in tatters, Kerry publicly complained on Sept. 29, 2016: \u201cSyria is as complicated as anything I\u2019ve ever seen in public life, in the sense that there are probably about six wars or so going on at the same time \u2013 Kurd against Kurd, Kurd against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sunni, Shia, everybody against ISIL, people against Assad, Nusra [Al Qaeda\u2019s Syrian affiliate]. This is as mixed-up sectarian and civil war and strategic and proxies, so it\u2019s very, very difficult to be able to align forces.\u201d<\/p>\n Admitting Deep-State Preeminence<\/strong><\/p>\n Only in December 2016, in an interview<\/a> with Matt Viser of the Boston Globe<\/em>, did Kerry admit that his efforts to deal with the Russians had been thwarted by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter \u2013 as well as all those forces he found so difficult to align.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately we had divisions within our own ranks that made the implementation [of the ceasefire agreement] extremely hard to accomplish,\u201d Kerry said. \u201cBut it \u2026 could have worked. \u2026 The fact is we had an agreement with Russia \u2026 a joint cooperative effort.<\/p>\n \u201cNow we had people in our government who were bitterly opposed to doing that,\u201d he said. \u201cI regret that. I think that was a mistake. I think you\u2019d have a different situation there conceivably now if we\u2019d been able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n The Globe\u2019s<\/em> Viser described Kerry as frustrated. Indeed, it was a tough way for Kerry to end nearly 34 years in public office.<\/p>\n After Friday\u2019s discussions<\/a> with President Trump, Kremlin eyes will be focused on Secretary of State Tillerson, watching to see if he has better luck than Kerry did in getting Ashton Carter\u2019s successor, James \u201cMad Dog\u201d Mattis and CIA\u2019s latest captive-director Pompeo into line behind what President Trump wants to do.<\/p>\n As the new U.S.-Russia agreed-upon ceasefire goes into effect on Sunday, Putin will be eager to see if this time Trump, unlike Obama, can make a ceasefire in Syria stick; or whether, like Obama, Trump will be unable to prevent it from being sabotaged by Washington\u2019s deep-state actors.<\/p>\n The proof will be in the pudding and, clearly, much depends on what happens in the next few weeks. At this point, it will take a leap of faith on Putin\u2019s part to have much confidence that the ceasefire will hold.<\/strong><\/p>\n Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry\/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). <\/i>Reprinted with permission from Consortium News<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The immediate prospect for significant improvement in U.S.-Russia relations now depends on something tangible: Will the forces that sabotaged previous ceasefire agreements in Syria succeed in doing so again, all the better to keep alive the \u201cregime change\u201d dreams of the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists? Or will President Trump succeed where President Obama failed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-29344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29344"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29346,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29344\/revisions\/29346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29344"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=29344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}