Originally Posted by
Easy Street
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’).
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as implemented by idealistic foreign policy specialists in LIbya, Syria, Serbia etc.
What is disheartening is that after more than a decade of disasters, there is still no one who questions the wisdom of the policies.