An image shared on social media of Russian mercenaries operating in Syria (Twitter)
Tom Ricks, Task & Purpose: How And Where Will Russia Retaliate For The US Airstrike That Killed Mercenaries In Syria?
That’s a question buzzing around Washington these days. My friend Eliot Cohen, a former State Department counselor who is now a professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, tells me he is “convinced that the Russians will try to get even.”
Indeed, the Russians have a reputation of tit-for-tatting especially in the Middle East, when they have been offended by local groups. But obviously hitting back at the U.S. is a different question.
I would think this issue right now is on the desks of the defense secretary, the director of national intelligence, and the national security advisor. What could Putin do? Well, he could respond with a massive hacking effort against U.S. forces in Syria. (Headline: “Russian Bots on the Ground”) Someone else I know suggests that they might attempt to knock down a U.S. aircraft, particularly an AC-130.
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WNU Editor: A lot of wild speculation from Tom Ricks in the above post, and the usual digs at President Trump. Editorializing aside .... Putin has bigger concerns right now, and that is winning this month's Russian Presidential election. As to the question .... will Russia get "even"? I am sure there may be some in the Kremlin who would like to do a tit-for-tat. But I do not think the Americans are that stupid to offer it to them.
4 comments:
They violated the agreement.
We responded and they lost.
We're even for a Russian.
Doing anything else would be counter productive.
Yeah it was the Russians who attacked and endangered the lives of everyone. If anything the Americans should get some sort of formal apology. This could have started a war and it was not because of the US, but clearly because of Russia who attacked! !
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/syrien-us-luftangriff-was-geschah-wirklich-in-deir-al-sor-a-1195901.html
A new article by the german SPIEGEL (sadly in german only), baseline is that after doing their own investigation and talking with peple who were there, it seems that what the Russian government is saying might actually be true and only a handful of Russians died, who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (i.e. on the wrong side of the deconfliction line)
I have to say that the first two comments by Mr. brown and anonymous number one are stupid in that they both ignore the fact that the US military shouldn't be in Syria in the first place! Aside from the fact that there's no legal authorization in either international law or domestic law, the US military presence is resulting in defacto partitioning of Syria in violation the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity and creating the basis for even more instability.
Secondly, ISIS itself wouldn't even exist had the US never invaded and occupied Iraq. It should be obvious, therefore, that the real crime in this Deir Ezzor incident was committed by the US because it flowed from all of the earlier crimes that we've been committing in the name of regime change.
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