Not an armistice or a temporary cease-fire, but an end to hostilities. It says in the news though that this is yet to be signed by the warring factions on the ground. Seeing as far as this is a proxy war, and that almost every faction on the ground works for either camp, could this actually work, or at least, could it be the beginning of the end?
Just to clarify… are US & Russia agreeing to halt their military actions as long as the parties on the ground agree to bury the hatchet and just get along?
If so, I don’t recall the last time I heard of such a bold faced intellectually dishonest proposal.
But attacks on ISIS and Nusra will be permitted.
Last I heard, the “moderate” rebels were getting their butts kicked by Assad. So, I’m wondering if this this basically a diplomatic way for the US to admit that it lost this proxy war. The only question I have is if the rebels will be allowed to go back to their old lives, or if the Assad regiem is planning on rounding them up and killing them as quietly as possible.
Thats pretty much it. The “moderate” rebels have been immoderately dealt with.
Assad has said his forces will continue attacking “terrorists,” which he and Russia have always defined in practice as anyone on Syrian soil, opposed to Assad.
Sounds about right. The US is pretty much going to turn its head and whistle loudly while Assad mops up.
As a matter of fact, that’s pretty much what we did to the Kurds in 1991. We supported them against Saddam Hussein, and then abandoned them to Saddam’s tender mercies after it was decided that we weren’t going to overthrow him. I hope they weren’t expecting better treatment this time.
Well, that may have been the best solution for stability.
ETA: Restoring the Alawite hegemony now, I mean. I’m not sure about “abandoning” the Kurds, although I note that we did establish a relationship with them anyway.
There will be no stability.
It’s interesting how the narrative has shifted from the threat of Islamic state to how Assad is triumphing against his rivals. Is it too soon to say ISIS is fast becoming an irrelevance?
With lots of help from Russia. Especially in the last few days while the “Peace Talks” were underway.
Personally, I have always held that Assad was the greater danger, responsible for the most killing, to date and ahead.
I wouldn’t say they’re irrelevant, but they seem to have been contained for the time being. ISIS mostly controls the sparsely-populated regions of Syria (they control something like half the territory, but only 10% of the population, while the Assad government controls something like a third of the territory, but 2/3 of the population.)
I imagine that Assad and/or Russia will get around to bombing those little towns off the map once they have taken care of more pressing matters.
Danger to who? To Syrians? Or to Americans? Or Europeans? Or Russians?
In an ideal world they’d all rank equally. In reality each side is free to overvalue their people and undervalue the others.
To Syrians. Assad’s faction has killed more Syrians than all others combined.
The capacity of IS/Daesh to threaten Europeans and Americans (in a relatively tiny way) was certainly fueled by Assad’s actions.
Well lets just hope those pesky Russians or Syrians don’t cross any of those USA red lines cos goodness knows what won’t happen.
You are absolutely correct. If only there was a way we could get into a full scale war with a nuclear-armed Russia or another protracted and pointless land war in some Middle Eastern backwater.
There’s no danger of that because the USA backed away a year ago, leaving a vacuum which was filled by the Russians and others, and on whose terms the truce has been agreed.
While nothing can top the scale and callousness of GWB, Obama’s foreign policy is a thing of unique ineptitude.
Obama’s foreign policy pretty much boils down to this: Figure out what would be in the United States’ interests, and then do the exact opposite thing.
He let Iran have nuclear material, even tho every last person on Earth knows they’ll try to build nukes with it.
All thru the “Arab Spring” he backed uprisings against stable and relatively pro-Western governments, even tho there was good reason to believe jihadists were behind it all. And what was the result? Libya is now an anarchist haven for militants, and it was only by the intervention of Russia that Syria isn’t ending up the same way.
And remember that ambassador that was killed in Benghazi? The people who killed him were the very same people we had been backing against Ghaddaffi. And they killed him with weapons the US had (illegally) provided. That’s why Republicans were so upset about that.
Cuba is a unique exception, in that it they’re our neighbor and it actually makes sense to reach out to them. But even then, Obama is making a mistake by giving them normalization for free. He isn’t extracting a single concession from Cuba, not even a promise to reform their awful human rights record.
So the failure of Obama’s foreign policy in Syria is in not having the US “bomb the little towns off the map”?