It took a mix of religion, guile, and a stumbling Obama to pull it off.
BY DAVID KENNER
Foreign Policy | SEPTEMBER 13, 2013
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — The Arab Spring, from the viewpoint of the Kremlin, has been one prolonged
headache. Russia has sustained a battering across the Middle East: It was
unable to stop the 2011 NATO intervention that toppled Muammar al-Qaddafi, and
it has been excoriated by its former friends in the Arab world for its
continuing military support of President Bashar al-Assad, even after more than
120,000 people have lost their lives in Syria.
But
today, President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov can
celebrate the end of their best week in the Middle East in the past two and a
half years. Rather than being dismissed as irrelevant or supporters of the
region's most brutal dictators, they're being described with a different sobriquet
-- statesmen.
The proximate
reasons for this change, of course, lie with a Russian-brokered proposal
that would see Assad relinquish
his chemical weapons. But Moscow has been quietly building support from
Cairo to Beirut to Damascus -- putting Putin in a position to pounce.
To read more....
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