Hillary, Putin and Syria

Hillary Clinton is very hawkish on getting rid of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad. She’s very hawkish on standing up to Putin in Syria and elsewhere. She’s hawkish on suppressing Iran.

As president, her preferences will be to ratchet up tensions against these, her chosen enemies. It’s not hard to imagine that she will bomb Syria’s infra-structure: electricity, water, factories, communications, and air force. Other possibilities include enlarging support to anti-Assad groups, regardless of their moderation, extremism, genocidal tendencies or whatever. That means equipping them with sophisticated weaponry. She’ll of course demand that Assad resign. She’ll send strongly worded demands to Putin too, mostly that he get out of Syria. These demands to both men will be accompanied by threats of new sanctions and bombardment by American forces. She’ll increase the American boots on the ground. She’ll make speeches that they are bad guys with bad human rights records. When her own actions precipitate an even greater humanitarian crisis of refugees, hardship and disruption, she’ll use that as a further excuse to intervene. The cries of the Syrian people or of various groups being decimated by anti-Assad forces will go unheard and unanswered, except to blame it all on Assad and Putin.

Putin will attempt to neutralize or outflank her moves without doubling down in Syria and getting Russia even more involved than it already is. He will parry her with countermoves. He is already doing this by the military action on Aleppo. He will try to rope Erdogan further into his camp and close down Turkey’s support of anti-Assad forces that have moved across the Turkey-Syria border. He’d like to see Turkey kick the U.S. and its nuclear weapons out of the Ircilik air base. He might launch a new peace conference offensive. Putin has already decided that Clinton’s election greatly increases the chances of war, and he has already begun to beef up his forces, satellites and armaments in Eastern Europe. He could counter Clinton with a blunt warning that he’d use the S-400 SAM throughout Syria if any moves to bomb Assad directly were made. He might be able to persuade Turkey to leave NATO and threaten Clinton with that.

With a Clinton-Nuland-Flournoy-Power-Rice team of viragos going into power, they will give the Harpies a great deal of competition. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan will look like cluck-clucking eunuchs next to these, their protégés, whose fixations on “enemies” are fed by their hatreds.

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6:08 pm on August 5, 2016