The day was May 1, 2003. Spring was giving way to summer in San Diego, California, in whose waters sat the USS Abraham Lincoln en route to its home port in Washington state. The carrier had just returned from the Persian Gulf, where it had been deployed t
Less than two months after hostilities began, thenPresident George W. Bush would declare those operations over. It was political theater, plain and simple, and the Abraham was his stage. Behind the lectern from which he gave his speech hung a now-infamous banner that read, tersely, “Mission Accomplished.” Fifteen years later, U.S. troops are still in Iraq.
Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment is worth remembering now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war is over – and that he would soon withdraw Russian forces there. Granted, he said nearly the same thing in March 2016. But let’s assume this time he means it. It’s a good excuse to take stock of what Russia has – and hasn’t – achieved, and
Moscow can indeed claim some successes in Syria. The first and by far most important is how it improved Russia’s standing at home and abroad. Russia entered Syria from a position of weakness, having blundered through two major crises at home.
The first concerned Ukraine, where a revolution brought to power a pro-Western government that Moscow proved powerless to stop. Russia’s impotence in Ukraine was a serious stain on Putin’s record. Putin had promised Russian strength, but he had not been able to deliver on this key Russian imperative – maintaining Russian control over the buffer zone that has saved Russia from foreign invaders many times over. So he did one of the only things he could do: he annexed Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that was already closely aligned with Russia. It was an act of provocation that earned Putin little but Western-led economic sanctions.
This is the context in which Russia entered the next crisis: the fall of the price of oil. Moscow had anticipated that oil prices would remain roughly $80-$100 per barrel and had budgeted accordingly.
Caught off guard and concurrently reeling from economic sanctions, the government was forced to make a variety of budget cuts. Some of these cuts to social services, education and pension funds set off protests in far-flung parts of the country.
Russia needed a distraction. Enter Syria, a long-time Russian ally that was in the throes of a rebellion. The United States, ever Russia’s straw man, had joined the fray in a vain and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to arm moderate rebels.