Putin choreographs G20 summit in Russia to isolate Obama on Syria
DEBKAfile Special Report September 5, 2013, 8:32 PM (IDT)
Putin and Obama ready pose for duel at G20
There
was never much hope that the 20 most influential national leaders in
the world meeting in the Russian town of St. Petersburg on Sept 5-6
would occasion a thaw in the icy relations between the American and
Russian presidents and some sort of accord for stopping the bloodshed in
Syria.
In his opening statement, Thursday, Sept. 5, Vladimir
Putin announced an open-ended discussion would start over a working
dinner and go on into the small hours of Friday. The Russian leader was
clearly setting the stage for a showdown with the US president, having
loaded the dice in Moscow’s favor with the opposition of most of the
Asian and European leaders to US military intervention in Syria. The
only exceptions were French President Francois Hollande and Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Tense eyes were trained on the G20
venue as Thursday night wore on to see the upshot of this weighty
conference, which started out with the two parties solidly entrenched in
their positions – the US president determined to exercise military
force against the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against its
people, and the Russian president equally determined to oppose it.
But
even if Putin manages to isolate Obama diplomatically by carrying a
majority motion against US military intervention, he will still have to
face up to the failure of his policy to stop the United States carrying
out its second military offensive against an Arab nation in two years,
after the 2011 Libya campaign.
As for Obama, the longer a decision to
go forward in Syria drags out, the greater the pressure by lawmakers in
Congress, whose votes he needs, and military imperatives, to embark on a
broader operation against Syria than the narrow missile assault he
first contemplated.
Had he wished to stick to his original plan,
he should have instantly fired off a number of Tomahawks at the Syrian
forces as soon as they gassed the eastern outskirts of Damascus on Aug.
21. Instead, he let ten days go by before suddenly deciding on Aug. 31,
to put the operation on ice for congressional authorization.
Had
he acted expeditiously, the whole issue of US military intervention in
Syria would have been behind him by the time he reached the summit in
Russia.
The American assault will now have to be expanded and revised
to cover widely-dispersed targets distributed across large areas in
view of the following developments:
1. The Syrian government has
scattered the chemical units responsible for the atrocity, along with
its chemical stocks in dozens of hideouts across the country to minimize
damage.
2. The recommendation by Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs
of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, cited by President Obama to justify the
delay in the offensive – it could take place “tomorrow, in a week or a
month” – hasn’t held water.
The chief of US naval operations, Adm.
Jonathan Greenert, commented Thursday that the four US destroyers off
the coast of Syria are “fully ready” for “a vast spectrum of operations,
including launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in Syria and
protecting themselves in the event of retaliation.”
And indeed, the
Senate Armed Forces committee, in backing US military force in Syria,
gave the president up to 90 days to finish the job.
3. The certainty
voiced by some US intelligence sources that they can locate the hideouts
of Syrian chemical units and weapons overstates the capabilities of
even the most sophisticated spy technology at their disposal.
4. Not
just the Russian leader, but Syria’s Bashar Assad and Iran’s Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, have bought enough time to set up military, intelligence
and political ambushes for the Americans, and will be ready to pounce
when the US operation goes forward.
As the G20 summiteers took their
seats in St. Petersburg, three Russian warships passed through the
Bosporus in their way to the Mediterranean.
debkafile’s military sources identitied them as the SSV-201 intelligence ship
Priazovye and two landing craft, the
Minsk and the
Novocherkassk, which carry 200 marines and 10 amphibious tanks.
All three leaders have issued a constant stream of threats to deter Washington from striking Syria:
a) They could supply Syria with highly-advanced arms capable of catching US forces by surprise;
b)
Russia and China could transfer advanced cyber warfare measures to
Damascus via Tehran, which Iranian cyber experts could operate in Syria
and Lebanon.
c) The Russian president has indicated that if the
Americans attack Syria, he might sell Iran super-weapons on the premise
that the strike on Syria would be the precursor to a US attack on Iran’s
nuclear program.
5. The basic presumption in Washington and
Jerusalem at the outset of the US plan to use military force in Syria
last month was that Hizballah would stay out of it. In the interim, the
Lebanese Shiite militia has begun mobilizing for defending Syria and for
cross-border reprisals against Israel from Syria and Lebanon.
Thursday
night, Iran’s National Security Council inner group held a secret
meeting in Khamenei’s inner sanctum on the ramifications of the
forthcoming US action against Syria.
debkafile’s
Iranian sources report that Revolutionary Guards commanders spoke out
in favor of activating the mutual defense treaty binding Iran and
Syria.
President Hassan Rouhani objected. In his view, Tehran must
continue to issue vague and general statements without showing its hand
on military action against the US. He warned that a vast American
military and naval force was piling up in the region and Iran must
beware of provoking a military response in which it would be quickly
bested.
Khamenei did not wait for the G20 to reach conclusions. He
issued a public statement saying: “We believe that the Americans are
committing a folly and mistake in Syria and [they] will accordingly take
the blow and definitely suffer.”
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