We are judged by the company we keep — and he’s a gangster
OUR friend Vladimir Putin, the gangster who runs Russia like it’s his spaza shop, has not been having a great time of late. Chickens are slowly coming home to roost. The law of averages dictates that bullies get their comeuppance at some point. Syria may yet turn out to be his Waterloo.
Syria is a theatre of war like no other in living memory, with just about all the significant powers and their flunkeys rushing in for a piece of the action. It’s more of a brawl than a war, with protagonists often unsure where the punch should land.
Arms manufacturers aren’t complaining. They’re drooling with delight. War — and death — is a lucrative business.
The trigger was of course the Arab Spring which swept across the Maghreb like a typhoon, knocking dictators from their pedestals. However, it didn’t produce the intended consequences. In Egypt, it installed a murderous dictator. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was slaughtered like an animal and the country turned into several fiefdoms run by different armed militias. Libya, along with Syria, contributes the greatest number of refugees now fanning across Europe in search of food and shelter.
The Arab Spring may be a dream deferred, if not totally destroyed.
Syria has become a war of attrition. There are no good guys in this morass. The US and its allies — the Brits and the Germans joined in this week — want to remove Bashar al-Assad and hopefully replace him with a malleable toady. They don’t seem to have learnt a thing from their escapade in Iraq.
Putin is the fly in the ointment. Emboldened by his conquests in Ukraine, he’s marched to the defence of his friend Assad, thus lining up against the US — a replay of the Cold War.
Putin’s chutzpah has earned him some unlikely admirers. He’s a cult figure in some conservative circles in Washington. Not that they share his ideological or idiosyncratic bent. He’s a convenient stick for Barack Obama’s back. Putin gets things done, they say. Well, he’s getting undone in Syria.
Neocons see foreign policy as the display of military strength, the mailed fist, and strutting the world stage with a swagger that leaves nobody in any doubt as to who’s boss. Ronald Reagan did that. He stared down the Soviet Union and outspent them on arms, practically into oblivion. George W Bush hewed to the pattern, knocking the obstreperous Saddam Hussein off his perch. Putin is a disciple of the thesis. He doesn’t give a damn.
Obama, on the other hand, refuses to pledge allegiance to such a dogma. Instead, the neocons allege, he goes around the world apologising on behalf of America. That’s a sacrilege worthy of an impeachment.
His foes are silently hoping that Syria will eventually force Obama’s hand, despite his promise to end Bush’s wars. The process of disengagement has been a bit messy. The Americans left Iraq, only for Islamic State to step into the vacuum. In Afghanistan, plans to bring troops home have had to be reviewed in the face of a resurgent Taliban.
For the Americans, Syria could be the beginning of a dalliance that ultimately leads to full-scale involvement. Shades of Vietnam.
First you send in the advisers, then the bombers who unleash hell from the skies but which, despite all the shock and awe — with smart bombs eviscerating little babies — never quite do the trick. Then the foot soldiers, young men in their prime, are frogmarched to war, sacrificial lambs in a lost cause who eventually come home in body bags.
Putin seems immune from such public scrutiny or international opprobrium. He’s arrogantly annexed the Crimea; he’s sponsoring separatists who are sowing havoc in eastern Ukraine and who in July last year shot down a Malaysian airliner with a Russian-made missile, killing all 298 people on board. There was no remorse from Putin, just a shrug of the shoulders.
With an economy ravaged by sanctions and the weak oil price, Putin, however, remains extremely popular not only at home but even here in South Africa. Our man in Moscow, we guffaw, is giving the Americans and their running dogs the two-finger salute.
But Syria may be a bridge too far for Putin. He’s already suffered some serious misfortune. A Russian plane was shot down by Islamic State in Egypt a month ago, killing all 224 people on board. On November 24, a Russian military plane on a bombing mission in Syria was shot down by Turkey and one of the pilots killed by rebels.
What seems to annoy Putin even more is the fact that a middling power like Turkey has had the gumption to take him on. But Turkey, a member of Nato, has powerful friends. Putin’s friends, the likes of South Africa, hardly pack a punch either militarily or economically.
At some point, though, South Africa will have to decide whether it’s worth hitching its wagon to such a feisty bruiser who seems intent on making enemies of all and sundry.
Putin’s chutzpah has earned him some unlikely admirers