But Assad was still hanging on, maintaining control of Damascus, the Syrian armed forces, and the vast majority of the Syrian population. It was time for the big dog to jump in and make sure the intended, inevitable result was achieved. Thus, on August 2, 2015, "U.S. officials" told Reuters that "the United States has decided to allow air strikes to help defend against any attack on the U.S.-trained Syrian rebels, even if the attackers come from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad."
Not many people, and certainly not the mainstream media, took much notice of that announcement at the time. No thang, after all, for the U.S. to announce attacks against a sovereign country. To this day, it's hardly ever mentioned in narratives of the conflict.
But with that announcement--a pledge to use American planes to shoot down Syrian planes in Syrian airspace and fire on Syrian troops who might dare to attack US-approved "rebels" on Syrian territory (something way beyond a "no-fly zone")--the United States, under President Obama, effectively declared war on Syria. Syria was now under explicit attack by the armed forces of two states--the U.S. and its NATO ally Turkey--along with a panoply of jihadi proxy armies supported by at least four other states -- Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Israel. The newly-promised direct American military attacks on Syrian forces would be the coup de gr ce for the last secular nationalist government in the Arab world.
I did notice that announcement at the time, and wrote about it in the last of a series of articles about Syria, where I said: "Those who wanted a war with Syria in 2013 have finally gotten what they wanted. It will be a dangerous diversion, at least, for the United States, and a certain disaster for the people of the Middle East. And nobody will stop it." Because, I assumed (along with virtually everyone else, I dare say) the inevitability of what we had seen since the demise of the Soviet Union: that nobody could or would make a military challenge to an American military intervention. The world's only superpower, and all.
Two Can Play
I, along with virtually everyone else, was wrong. There was another actor in the world who noticed the announcement, took it as the declaration of war--the intent to finish off the government of Syria--that it was, and decided not to let it go unchallenged. Thus, in September 2015, Russia accepted the Syrian government's official request for military help to resist the multinational jihadi-cum-Western-air-power-and-special-forces onslaught. Without saying it this way explicitly, Vladimir Putin was sending Russian armed forces to prevent the final offensive against the Syrian state that the United States had announced it was readying. It is a flagrant and ubiquitous omission to talk about the Russian military intervention in Syria without mentioning the American threat that preceded it.
As Kerry completed his thoughts cited above, Assad didn't wait for ISIS to threaten Damascus, or for the U.S. to start bombing his army; "instead"he got Putin to support him."
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