Putin and Ayatollah "Humiliated, Angered" and "Furious"

Putin is said to be “humiliated and angered” over the collapse of the Assad regime, and top brass in Iran’s military are all cat-fighting with each other over whose fault the unexpected vanquishing of Assad was because neither they nor Putin, who is “furious” over Russia’s intel failure, saw the sudden downfall of the Assad regime coming.

Russia, to save face with other despots it’s backed, negotiated a quick deal for Assad’s transfer out of Damascus: Assad would not order the Damascus-based military to make a hopeless fight against the incoming rebels if the rebels let him escape. Russia told Assad his situation had suddenly become hopeless, so he needed to give it up immediately and flee with his life, rather than try to hold on with a futile battle to the finish.

Translate that as “There was nothing either Russia or Iran could do to save him from the sudden assault on Damascus by the revolutionary forces.”

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, personally approved the rescue of Assad on Sunday and has guaranteed his safety in exile, although he has no intention of meeting him, Kremlin sources said….

Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, confirmed that Assad and his family were now in Russia and would not be handed over to the International Criminal Court, which has accused him of murdering thousands of his opponents….

Assad had been a vital Kremlin ally in the Middle East and the collapse of his regime is said to have humiliated and angered Putin.

The Russian president is also said to be furious that his intelligence agents in Syria did not predict the speed and scale of the rebel advance on Damascus….

The reputation of Moscow’s once-vaunted intelligence services had already taken a blow with its mistaken analysis that Putin would be welcomed as a “conquering hero” in Ukraine after his invasion in 2022….

By helping Assad flee, Putin feels that he has saved face and protected his client state, an important pillar of his international alliance-building, it is believed….

Alexander Kokcharov, a geoeconomics analyst at Bloomberg Economics, said the Kremlin needed to save Assad to reassure its other dictator clients that Moscow could be relied upon in times of crisis.

He said: “They will know that if they are threatened with an overthrow in their native country, they can still live comfortably in Putin’s Russia. This is part of the Kremlin’s offering to its geopolitical allies.”

In other words, despots can count on living comfortably in Russia, no matter what crimes they committed against their own people for decades.

Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said—as if it helps his case any—that it was clear that the overthrow of Assad was due to “a joint US-Israeli plot.” If he’s right, that merely means the US and Israel successfully beat down Iran and Russia simultaneously in a proxy war because both Iran’s and Russia’s ambitions in the Middle East were gutted by Syria’s fall. Almost no one is debating the scale of devastation to Russia’s and Iran’s ME plans.

More likely, Assad’s days were always numbered; Russia is exhausted from its invasion of Ukraine and couldn’t keep up the battle any longer in Syria, while Iran’s proxies have been largely wiped out everywhere else by Israel, and its leadership is also spent.

Russia’s huge fall

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote an extensive article this week about the many ways in which Putin is desperately failing. Evan’s-Pritchard makes a case that a downfall equal in scale to the collapse of the Soviet Union may not be that far away. Let me give some bullet points from his article for you to, at least, consider:

• Ukraine is slowly losing the three-year conflict on the battlefield, but … Russia is slowly losing the economic conflict at a roughly equal pace. “Russia’s overheated, military-Keynesian war economy finally looks much like the dysfunctional German war economy of late 1917.”

• Putin’s victory in Ukraine has fallen far short of the quick and inevitable stomping many once predicted. It has gone far slower than anyone, most of all Putin, ever expected. The time and cost it has taken are an embarrassment to Putin, and now he has lost credibility over everything he attempted to do in the Middle East, too: “The limits of Russian military power have been revealed.”

• Even Trump—the guy Putin supposedly had in his pocket—is negotiating much tougher with Putin now that Putin is what Trump would call a “LOSER” in the Middle East, Trump has asserted in the last 24 hours that Putin will not in any negotiations keep the four regions he has taken that were part of eastern Ukraine (the Donbas), while keeping Crimea remains in play as a possible chip to negotiate for. “Putin now goes into Ukraine peace talks from a position of weakness.” Russian leaders now expect Trump to strong-arm Zelensky into negotiating, but they also expect Trump to do more to destroy the Russian economy if Putin doesn’t negotiate and accept some big losses. The Kremlin’s bet on a contested and chaotic outcome from the US elections became a cruel disappointment.

• The Russian economy, now in its third wartime year, is suffering intensely. Central bank interest rates forced higher than 20% to curb relentless inflation due to both Western sanctions and wartime demands are bankrupting businesses that are unlikely to survive another year. “The economy cannot exist like this for long. It’s a colossal challenge for business and banks,” said German Gref, Sberbank’s chief executive. Sergei Chemezov, head of the defense giant Rostec, said the monetary squeeze was becoming dangerous. “If we continue like this, most companies will essentially go bankrupt.” Putin’s war “is cannibalizing the rest of the economy.”

• Russia has lost nearly half a million lives in this meat grinder, and 800,000 Russian males have fled Russia to avoid it. As a result, the economy is now hugely short of smart and/or strong-bodied workers, so that it will be crippled for years to come even if the invasion ends very soon.

• Besides huge shortages of workers, the economy and the military suffer from huge shortages of high-tech products and components that once came from Western companies. Russia’s tanks are now seen operating without laser targeting gear because they cannot get critical components. Potential alternative Chinese suppliers have proven unwilling to risk secondary sanctions from the West.

• Russia’s oil revenues have fallen for each of the last ten months to where they are barely half of what they were just a few months after the invasion began. Additional US sanctions imposed three weeks ago against Russian banking have made it even more difficult for Russia to trade energy and vital technology.

• Russia’s gold reserves have also fallen by half over the last fifteen months.

So, a Soviet-era, grand-scale collapse may be less than a year away and could hit as unexpectedly as the fall of Assad, leaving Putin little time to either finish what he is doing or negotiate. Trump knows this and will use it as hard leverage to end the war. Even then, Putin will be left with a nation that will remain crippled by sanctions and massive war expenses that have drained its coffers for years to come. He will likely win something from his invasion, but the cost has already been made extraordinary for years to come.

Meanwhile the US tyrant …

Meanwhile, the despotic leader who still remains in the appearance of power in the US, who brought the nation into the year 1984, is busy pulling old US imperial tricks to seize the advantage that the US military-industrial complex (MIC) always works for. Biden has been funding ISIS to win the war in Syria and is now deploying his ISIS warriors to take power from the incoming rebels who put away Assad.

According to one story, anyway, Biden is funding a declared terrorist to head up the new Syrian government, who promises, as did the Biden-supported Taliban (gifted with massive US weaponry donated to them so they could seize and hold power over the people of Afghanistan), to run a government that does not trample on human rights.

Allegedly, the new designee for leadership and his henchmen are reformed offshoots from al Qaeda, sworn to a better path … so long as the US money keeps coming. That never goes bad! The Biden Administration is probably already stacking the gold bars onto pallets—most likely Russian confiscated gold … or just your tax dollars at work.

“This transition process should lead to credible, inclusive, and non-sectarian governance that meets international standards of transparency and accountability, consistent with the principles of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254,” Blinken wrote.

Uh-huh. Because that is always how that works out when the US engages in nation-building. (Fasten your sarcasm hat; it’s about to get bumpy.)

“The transition process and new government must also uphold clear commitments to fully respect the rights of minorities, facilitate the flow of humanitarian assistance to all in need, prevent Syria from being used as a base for terrorism or posing a threat to its neighbors, and ensure that any chemical or biological weapons stockpiles are secured and safely destroyed,” Blinken said.

Ah, well, we’ve got it covered then! No doubt, we’ll hire a secondary group of noble terrorists to keep watch over the first group to make sure they do as they’re told, much like George Bush hired mercenaries to go into Tora Bora and capture bin Laden. Mercenaries by obvious nature, of course, would have just sold out to a higher bidder (rich bin Laden, himself) if they found him (which is probably what actually happened, and why we lost track of him for years).

Meanwhile, some of the US-trained terrorists in Syria are claimed by Hal Turner to have been turned around from Damascus, now that they are no longer needed to aid the overthrow of Assad, in order to march to Iraq and stir up trouble there. (I have zero idea of the validity of the IRANIAN source of this report; but it does sound like the usual US modus operandi, so let’s just see what actually happens.)

After all, one doesn’t have to even think back as far as Biden can remember (which is a short trip down memory lane) to recall better than Biden how he unfroze billions of Iranian funds after Trump won the election. Was the purpose to help make sure Trump has a tougher time confronting Iran’s nuclear goals once he takes the reins? Nuclear goals are about all Iran has left if it wants to damage Israel. Its proxies all lie on the ground, busted to pieces and bleeding everywhere. Its supply routes are a shambles. So, let’s shore the regime up with lots of money to help reach their nefarious goals.

The Biden administration claims that the money is not going to be used for terrorism because the funds can only be used for humanitarian purposes.

Sure. They forget that money is fungible. Save a billion on this humanitarian program designed to help Iranian citizens by using the US-freed funds (and, thereby, also help keep the Ayatollah in power) and spend that billion from the money you had designated for humanitarian aid on developing a nuclear weapon! A billion saved is a billion earned, which, with current inflation, is the new “a penny saved is a penny earned.”

But these guys don’t even try to hide it:

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in May, said in an interview last year that Iran would spend the money however it wanted to.

“What is your expectation of its [the money’s] use?” asked NBC News host Lester Holt. “We’re told that it’s for humanitarian purposes.…”

“This money belongs to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and naturally, we will decide, the Islamic Republic of Iran will decide to spend it wherever we need it,” Raisi answered. “How to spend our money of course, it is under the authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Meanwhile, Biden’s own economy isn’t all it’s been cackled up to be, with US inflation taking another bounce upward in the latest CPI report, as expected.

(The stories carrying all these reports and quotes appear in boldface among the headlines below for paid subscribers.)