Russia Moves Into Syria

Russia is shipping massive quantities of offensive weapons, materiel and soldiers to Syria.

The massive Condor flights carrying all kinds of supplies now arrive twice a day through Iran and Iraq into Bassel Al-Assad International Airport outside the port city of Latakia. The cargo is for Russian soldiers, not Syrian government forces, but is seen as a build-up to aid Bashar Assad’s embattled regime. 

The defense official, briefed on the latest satellite photos of the Syrian coastline, said: “This is the largest deployment of Russian forces outside the former Soviet Union since the collapse of the USSR.” 

The only thing surprising about this is that it took so long.  

Syria has been a Russian client state since the 1970s. The reason for its original alliance with Soviet Russia is obvious enough. The Arab Socialist Baath Party was a natural ally of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Syria’s take on secularism and socialism weren’t as severe as Russia’s, but Syria was ideologically much closer to Russia than to, say, Sweden. That was for damn sure.

And Russia wanted proxies and influence wherever it could get them even if the ideological overlap was just partial. It still does. All great powers and aspiring great powers and used-to-be great powers are interested in proxies and influence wherever they can get them.

Russia has what is sometimes referred to as its only Mediterranean naval base in Syria’s medium-sized city of Tartus, but it’s not much more than a gas station and repair shop. Russia’s big warships won’t even fit there. It’s not particularly important. What matters far more to Russia is its influence in the world, which is still drastically down from the great and terrible days of the Soviet Union.

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, of course, wants all the help he can get at this late date. He has been getting it from Iran and Hezbollah all along, and from Russia at least diplomatically. He’d certainly take help from the United States at this point. He wanted help from the United States at the very beginning. That’s why he characterized the upheaval in Syria as a war against terrorism long before a single ISIS or Nusra fighter fired a shot, back when it was just him against unarmed protesters demanding some kind of political reform.

Assad might even take help from the Israelis at this point. Not that the Israelis would lift a finger to assist Hezbollah’s co-patron and co-armorer. That won’t happen under any circumstances.

So here comes daddy Russia, riding to the rescue of its old totalitarian client.

Maybe the Russians will go ahead and smash ISIS. Maybe they’ll do the dirty work that has the West so fatigued. Maybe they’ll do everybody a favor.

The result won’t be pretty, however. Soviet Russia did everybody a favor when it smashed through the eastern front of Hitler’s Nazi regime, but Poland sure paid the price. As did a lot of other countries in Europe.

The Wall Street Journal isn’t happy about this at all.

For 70 years American Presidents from both parties have sought to thwart Russian influence in the Middle East. Harry Truman forced the Red Army to withdraw from northern Iran in 1946. Richard Nixon raised a nuclear alert to deter Moscow from resupplying its Arab clients during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Even Jimmy Carter threatened military force to protect the Persian Gulf after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

America wasn’t quite as burned out then.

We’re all tired of trying to fix a part of the world that refused to be fixed, but nature abhors a vacuum.