The Syrian disaster just got even worse

It is not hard to understand what Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to do in Syria. It will be very hard to stop him from succeeding. It did not need to be this way.

First, the facts on the ground: Russia is building up military power in the vicinity of Latakia and Tartus, Syrian coastal cities that housed Soviet military units during the Cold War and remain Russia’s best bases in the Mediterranean, on NATO’s southern flank. Russian troops known to be present in the area include jet fighter squadrons and helicopter gunship units, as well as the personnel required to operate and sustain them. Marines are moving in. Russian warships are regularly transiting the Bosporus on their way to or from Syrian ports.

As of this week, these forces are no longer just for show or local defence. The Russian air force has entered the civil war in dramatic fashion, striking targets all across the country, many of them far from the forces and territory of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The goal of these Russian strikes is clear: crush the rebel militias that posed a clear and increasingly present danger to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Moscow’s man in Damascus (what’s left of it). A few bombs may be hurled at ISIL to keep up appearances, but the military buildup and strikes on anti-regime forces make clear what Putin’s true motive is. Defeating ISIL isn’t it.

Not that Putin cares much for ISIL. Russia has had too many of its own bitter experiences with Islamist terrorists for it to make that mistake. And Putin will certainly enjoy hammering away at ISIL, if only to show up the West for its own weak, half-hearted attacks against the group. But the point of Russia’s efforts, as they are plainly admitting, is to shore up the barbarous Assad regime, which had been teetering on the brink of collapse.

The civil war in Syria — four years running, with 200,000 dead and 11 million displaced — was never going to have a happy ending. But Russia’s intervention has, incredibly, found a way to make things even worse. Not only is there a new party to the combat, but Russia seems to be farming out the dirty work to proxies whose intervention is less welcome even than Moscow’s. Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terror organization, has loaned its forces to the Assad regime before, and reports say it is preparing to do so again. Iran, likewise, has provided munitions, training and, at times, direct military support to the regime; it, too, is reported to be preparing to deploy hundreds of troops, at the least, in direct combat against anti-regime forces.

Hezbollah and Iran on the ground, Russia in the air: this is probably the worst of all possible outcomes to the Syrian tragedy. The butcher Assad will likely be preserved in power. Syria will remain a broken, failed state, relying on Russian military support, and Moscow’s proxies, for defence and internal security. Iran and Moscow will naturally draw closer, as allies fighting a common enemy do. Hezbollah will gain military experience and weapons it will sooner or later turn on Israel. What few moderate militias are still fighting to make Syria democratic won’t last long.

There is absolutely no good news here, for the West or the suffering people of Syria. Yet there is little the West can do at this point. Having ceded the initiative to Russia, it would have to take military action against it to persuade it to change course now. That won’t happen. All we can do is learn from this disaster.

This is the logical end point of permitting a humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe to unfold in a strategically important area of the world. Absent real, sustained engagement, notably by the United States, our wan attempts at soft power and sporadic bombing runs have been rudely brushed aside by Putin’s warplanes and Hezbollah’s infantry.

America’s retreat from the world is no longer abstract — it has delivered Syria, once seen as ripe for slow Westernization, to Moscow and Iran’s mullahs, probably for generations. The strategic defeat is exceeded only by the moral.