Although Russia is about to help Syrian strongman Bashar Assad recapture a key city lost in his five-year civil war with anti-government forces, Moscow is getting sucked into a quagmire in that broken country, President Obama said Tuesday.
Obama said during a press conference that he “absolutely” stands by the assessment he made last year of what will happen to Russia if President Vladimir Putin insists on overt military involvement in Syria.
“If … there’s anybody who thinks that, somehow, the fighting ends because Russia and the regime has made some initial advances — about three-quarters of the country is still under control of folks other than Assad. That’s not stopping anytime soon,” Obama said when asked about Assad’s impending victory in Aleppo.
Obama, speaking in Rancho Mirage, Calif., acknowledged that U.S.-backed rebels who hold Syria’s largest city would probably succumb to the combined Assad-Russia force pounding it.
“Obviously, a bunch of rebels are not gonna be able to compete with the hardware of the second-most powerful military in the world,” Obama said, making no mention of how “a bunch of rebels” — the Mujahideen — handed Russia’s more powerful predecessor, the Soviet Army, a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Obama said Putin will have to essentially throw good money after bad to keep Assad installed in Damascus.
“Now, Putin may think that he’s prepared to invest in a permanent occupation of Syria with Russian military — that’s gonna be pretty costly, that’s gonna be a big piece of business,” Obama said. “And if you look at the state of the Russian economy, that’s probably not the best thing for Russia.”
Obama said he takes no pleasure in predicting that Putin’s successes will be short term.
“I say that, by the way, with no pleasure,” he said. “This is not a contest between me and Putin. The question is how can we stop the suffering? Stabilize the region?” he asked.
“There’s nothing that’s happened over the last several weeks that points to those issues being solved, and that is what I mean by a ‘quagmire,'” Obama added.
“The real question we should be asking is: What is it that Russia thinks it gains if it gets a country that’s been completely destroyed as an ally, that it now has to perpetually spend billions of dollars to prop up?” he asked.
