Obama: Putin hasn’t won anything

All the Russian president has gained are higher poll numbers — in state-controlled media, the president said.

POLITICO

Vladimir Putin is weak, Russia faces a “quagmire” in Syria, and critics of U.S. policy in Syria are talking “mumbo-jumbo.”

That was President Barack Obama’s defiant take at a White House press conference on Friday afternoon, at which he fielded questions about Russia’s surprise air strikes on Syrian rebels. With critics saying the Russian president has outmaneuvered and embarrassed Obama, the president made no apologies and argued that Putin is the one with real problems.

Putin’s bid to prop up Syrian ruler Bashar Assad will only extend that country’s bloody civil war, Obama said. “It’s going to get [Russia] stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work,” Obama said. “And they will be there for a while if they don’t take a different course.”

Obama repeated his view that the Syrian conflict can’t end until Assad steps down, and said he has no intention of shifting his goal of a negotiated peace deal that would require Assad’s exit.

“We are very clear about sticking to our belief and our policy that the problem here is Assad, and the brutality that he has inflicted on the Syrian people, and it has to stop,” Obama said. “We are not going to cooperate with a Russian campaign to simply try to destroy anybody who is disgusted and fed up with Mr. Assad’s behavior.”

Claims that the Russian leader has outwitted him overlooks Russia’s economic decline and its political isolation over his aggression in Ukraine, Obama said.

“As a consequence of these brilliant moves, their economy is contracting at 4 percent this year,” Obama said. “Their main allies in the Middle East were Libya and Syria… and those countries are falling apart, and he’s now had just to send in troops and aircraft in order to prop up this regime.”

Moreover, Russia’s “more overt” support for Assad could burn Putin at home.

“The Sunni population throughout the Middle East is going to see [Russia] as a supporter and endorser of those barrel bombs landing on kids at a time when Russia has a significant Muslim population inside its own borders to worry about,” Obama said. Barrel bombs are a crude explosive weapon that Assad’s forces have repeatedly dropped on civilians.

Russia has a growing Muslim population, estimated at between 12 and 14 percent, and radical Islamists have footholds in some Russian regions. In June, Sunni extremists in the country’s Northern Caucasus region declared allegiance to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

ISIS opposes Assad, and Putin says he wants to destroy the group—although many of his air strikes this week have targeted other rebel groups, reportedly including ones that have received covert backing from the CIA.

The president said critics who complain he has mishandled the Syrian conflict by not intervening more aggressively have failed to offer realistic solutions to a complex situation.

“Throughout this process, people have looked for an easy, low-cost answer,” Obama said.

“What I’d like to see people ask is, ‘Specifically, precisely — what exactly is it you would do?'” Obama said. “And typically what you get is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo,” he added.

Obama dismissed arguments that arming moderate Syrian rebels years ago or following through on threatened air strikes against Assad’s regime in 2013 might have solved the conflict. “No amount of U.S. military engagement will solve the problem,” he said.

He also said — in gentler terms — that he disagrees with Hillary Clinton’s call for establishing a no-fly zone and a humanitarian corridor for refugees in the country, options Obama has so far resisted for fear of getting drawn deeper into the intractable conflict.

“There’s a difference between running for president and being president,” Obama said. “Hillary would be the first to say that when you’re sitting… in the Situation Room, things look a little bit different.”

Obama said he hoped Russia would cooperate with the international community and win an end to Western sanctions. “I want Russia to be successful,” he insisted.

But he could hardly mask his personal disdain for Putin, whose only real success, he said, has been to raise his own poll numbers at home.

“Which may be why the Beltway is so impressed,” Obama said. “Because that tends to be the measure of success.”

“Of course,” he told the skeptical reporters before him, perhaps with a touch of envy, “it’s easier to do when you’ve got a state controlled media.”