Backfire....

Obama to Putin: Good luck with that

U.S. officials are convinced Russia's intervention in Syria will backfire. 

By Michael Crowley

As Russia pounded Syria with air strikes for a second day Thursday, the Obama administration showed little appetite for directly challenging Moscow’s bold foray into the Middle Eastern conflict.

Instead, the White House is responding to Vladimir Putin with an almost taunting message: Good luck with that.

Senior Obama officials debating the U.S. response say they believe the Russian president is making a costly mistake that he will regret, committing his country’s military and prestige to an unwinnable fight sure to inflame Islamic extremism inside Russia.

But Putin hardly seemed chastened, and even appeared to accuse the U.S. of lying about the Russian airstrikes. Speaking in Moscow, Putin claimed that reports about civilian casualties from the strikes had “emerged even before our planes got on in the air.”

“We are prepared for such information attacks,” Putin said.

U.S. officials continued to say that Russian was striking areas far from the strongholds of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Nor did they dispute reports — which Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said he had independently confirmed — that Russia had bombed some moderate rebel fighters who have been covertly supplied by the CIA. Putin denied that Russian any strikes had hit CIA-backed rebels.

Analysts agreed that Putin was incurring risks by bombing Syria. But that doesn't mean his intervention is good news for the White House, which will need to reassses the changed Syrian battlefield.

Exacerbating the sense of a shifting conflict were reports that Iran has sent hundreds of troops to Syria in recent days -- reports the White House did not dispute. That suggests Tehran and Moscow have mounted a coordinated offensive to fortify Syrian president Bashar al Assad.

“There is a real danger that the crude application of Russian air power, plus Iranian and Hezbollah power does change the situation on the ground,” said Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment, and a former White House, State Department and Pentagon official handling Russia issues in the 1990s.

Hezbollah is a Shiite Lebanese militia, funded and controlled by Tehran, that has long provided Assad with military support against the mix of moderate and radical opposition groups he has battled since Syria’s civil war began in mid-2011. Those radical groups include Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al Qaeda, and ISIS, although the latter group has been more focused on consolidating its territory and power than in toppling Assad. That could explain why Russia's initial strikes have focused on other groups more explicitly focused on Assad's defeat.

ISIS does encourage Muslims to strike targets in Europe and the U.S., but might increasingly turn its attention to Russia now that Moscow has intervened on behalf of Assad. ISIS is a Sunni Muslim group, as are most opponents of Assad, whose Alawite Muslim sect is an offshoot of Shiism.

The White House predicts that Putin’s Syria intervention will make Russia a bigger target for Islamic radicals.

“Ultimately, it’s the Russians who will pay the highest price,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. “These grave consequences for Russia are more dangerous than any diplomatic response that can be imposed by the international community.”

The Russian president may already be responding to radicalism at home. In June, Islamic militants based in Russia’s North Caucasus region declared their allegiance to ISIS and established a governate in the area under the name Wilayat Qawqaz.

In April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called ISIS his country's "greatest enemy," adding that "hundreds of Russian citizens" were fighting for the group in Syria.

Sounding a similar theme during his address at the United Nations on Monday, Putin said: "We cannot allow these criminals who already tasted blood to return back home and continue their evil doings."

Obama officials argue that Putin's strikes will do just that, by inflaming and prolonging a Syrian conflict that Obama insists can only be settled politically.

Before Putin's surprise military offensive, Secretary of State John Kerry had begun active diplomacy in pursuit of such a deal. But those efforts were premised on signs that Assad was in danger of defeat, and therefore perhaps willing to bargain. It also assumed that Russia might support his exit from power in what Kerry has called a "managed transition" that officials say could last months or even years.

Now both those assumptions appear shattered. WIth the support of Russian air power and, perhaps, more Iranian ground forces, Assad is likely to regain the battlefield momentum against the opposition — particularly at a moment when a $500 million Pentagon program to train and equip moderate Syrian fighters appears to have failed and is likely to be dramatically downscaled.

Nor does Putin look prepared to push Assad from power anytime soon.

"We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad's armed forces and Kurdish militias are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria," the Russian leader told the U.N.

At the Pentagon, which for more than a generation was dedicated to doing battle with Russia's military, the priority on Thursday was to avoid a U.S.-Russian clash in the skies of Syria.

A day after Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called Russia's failure to give the U.S. ample notice of the strikes "unprofessional," officials began establishing a more formal dialogue to reduce the possibility of an accidental clash between two air forces operating in the same combat zone for the first time since 1945.

Pentagon officials had a "cordial and professional" discussion with Russian military officials on Thursday about keeping their operations in Syria safely separate, according to press secretary Peter Cook, but the two sides did not agree on any resolution.

A secure video teleconference with Moscow had lasted for about an hour, Cook said, with both sides agreeing to "consider the proposals and give feedback in the coming days." The two sides may talk again, he said.