Originally Posted by
GlobalNav
For the Russians and the Soviets before that, anything that creates chaos and destruction makes space for them to seek their own ends - which likely is dominance in the region. It works whenever the west lets them get away with it.
I’m no fan of the Assad regime, but equally I’m not convinced that assisting a UN-recognised Government to reassert control of its territory fits the definition of ‘creating chaos’. There has been chaos for sure, but the Russians didn’t create it. Most importantly, they have exploited it effectively
because they had a clear and realistic end state in mind.
At the outset of the Syrian civil war (four years before the Russian deployment) General David Richards, the UK’s Chief of Defence Staff at the time, advised that Western support to the opposition should be ‘all’ (i.e. topple the regime) or ‘nothing’. Anything else would, in his view, have simply prolonged the suffering of the Syrian people to no benefit for anyone. Time has proven him to be absolutely correct. But his view was dismissed by those in control of national security policy as ‘purist’. The ingrained realism of most military officers seems to be unwelcome in circles dominated by idealistic foreign policy specialists, to the recent detriment of Western strategy. (See his autobiography ‘Taking Command’).