"There are two Putins."

Recently-retired MI6 head Richard Moore, Financial Times

“'I fundamentally assess that Putin is not interested in negotiations. There are no negotiations, not real negotiations. He’s attempting to play us,' [says former MI6 chief Richard Moore].

"According to Moore, there are two Putins. One is the cold-eyed realist, the ruthless leader who cuts deals when he has to. This is the Putin who last year accepted the loss of Syria and the ousting of his ally, the dictator Bashar al-Assad, and sought only to protect Russian bases there. The other Putin is ideological and has 'a deeply wired feeling that Ukraine doesn’t have the right to exist.' This Putin invaded Ukraine and his objective, says Moore, is not to bargain over slices of territory but to dominate.

"In Moore’s view, the only way to confront the ideological Putin is to pile so much pressure on him that he is forced to choose between fulfilling his legacy project in Ukraine and holding on to power. That’s why Moore argues that Ukraine should have the right to strike deep into Russia, and that more economic pressure should be brought to bear on the Putin regime. 'This is a very, very winnable contest,' he says. 'It’s particularly important that we don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.'”

~ from an interview with the outgoing head of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service on the rise of China, why Putin is not interested in talks — and how screen spies aren’t always far from the truth, 'Former MI6 chief Richard Moore: Britain must regain the ‘power of example’'

The "anti-imperialism of idiots" + "the Americocentric delusion" = Putin?!

"The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as 'campists,' whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.
    "The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this 'the anti-imperialism of idiots': 'This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners....' Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview."

~ Dorian Lynskey, from his column 'Why the Left is split over Ukraine.'  Hat tip Perry de Havilland, who observes sagely that a similar criticism also applies to certain libertarians/conservatives in the grip of the Americocentric delusion...

Syria? Or bust?

“The whole of the Middle East is intimately related. Beneath the smooth
surface of British rule and the slender garrisons which normally sustain it are
smouldering the antagonisms of centuries. There are always feuds and animosities.
There are always scores to be settled and fanatical thirsts to be slaked.”
- Winston Churchill, 1929

American sabre rattling has started over Syria. Will President Obama now send troops, tanks and planes to intervene? As commentator Robert Tracinski wonders, “Maybe he will, maybe he won't, maybe it's already too late. Maybe he'll wait for the French to do it.”

But if he does, which way would he have them point their guns?

The Syrian regime has been helping the Iranian revolution go nuclear, helping Hezbollah send missiles into Israel, and (arguably) helped itself to Iraqi chemical weapons and technology before and during the Iraq war.  And last week, and maybe months ago as well, it reportedly helped send out a gas attack killing thousands of anti-regime Syrians.

And the rebels opposing the Syrian regime? They’re the same brand of Islamists ousted so violently in Egypt because they were in the process of rapidly setting up an Islamic dictatorship.  "Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of." And those fighting forces you can speak of fly the black flag of Al Qaeda—no less brutal than Assad, and even more virulently opposed to the West.

Tragic though the conflict is then, the West has no dog in this particular civil war.  It has nothing for which to support the regime, and no reason to support its (and our) long-term Islamist enemies.

Perhaps the only role for the West here is the one counselled by Margaret Thatcher in Yugoslavia once Tito died and the scab was ripped off a century or more of tribal hatred: “End the arms embargoes and seal the borders.”

I fear however the West is instead about to arm its enemies.

[Hat tip for links and quote to Robert Tracinski and Robert Spencer]