Watching the US attempt to explain to the public why Washington can’t join the Russians in targeting extremists in Syria has been entertainment gold. The fundamental PR problem revolves around the fact that the West has gone out of its way to hold up ISIS as the quintessential example of pure, unadulterated evil that must be eradicated at all costs and yet when Moscow began bombing ISIS targets and publicly implored the US to join in, Washington said no.
If you’re the public that seems strange. To be sure, everyday Westerners are accustomed to Russophobic propaganda in the news and in cinema and the public is thoroughly conditioned to think of The Kremlin as a weird, multi-colored palace complex staffed with hundreds of James Bond villains in a country where it’s always dark, and always snowing. That said, Western leaders have had a difficult time explaining why that’s somehow worse than ISIS, whose slickly-produced videos have so far depicted a series of beheadings, a Jordanian pilot being burned alive, “spies” being drowned in a cage, and four men being packed into a Toyota Corolla which is then destroyed at close range by a rocket launcher.
The answer, of course, is that ISIS and the various other extremist groups battling for control of Syria have almost all received training and funding from the US and its regional allies at one point or another and at the end of the day, destroying ISIS nets nothing for Washington in terms of geopolitics. In fact, were the group to go the way of the dinosaurs, it would help to restore the Assad regime which is the worst possible outcome in the eyes of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
In short: from a geopolitical perspective, deterring Assad, Russia, and Iran is much more important than fighting any ragtag band of extremists, but that’s a tough sell to a public that’s grown weary of watching Westerners having their heads chopped off on the nightly news.
Moscow’s position is simple. The Russians are in Syria to restore Assad which means waging war on his enemies and because some of his enemies are terrorists, that means Russia is at war with terror. Putin has made no secret of this, but the US has been forced to act as though he has because without the whole “we can’t be sure what his aims are” line, an impatient public might start to demand answers as to why Washington is so obstinate when it comes to cooperation on anti-terror ops.
Now, Bloomberg reports that Russian officials have “admitted” that Moscow’s goals in Syria go beyond ISIS. Here’s more:
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