Vlad set trap?

With a gap-filled chain of logic, David Samuels of Tablet puts forth a theory that Vladimir Putin was the mastermind behind the Damascus gas attack. Discounting the acting ability of Iranian leadership, whose public statements suggested they "were at the least discomfited by the Syrian government’s actions, if not blind-sided by them,"  and never mentioning the possibility that well-funded Syrian rebels could have carried the attack out, he asserts that the de facto head of the Syrian chain of command is not Assad, but those to whom he is beholden, his Iranian and Russian counterparts, Ayatollah Khamenei and Putin.

The idea that Assad gave the order to carry out such a massive and politically dangerous attack without the approval of his Russian and Iranian advisers is also absurd—given the regime’s near-total reliance on Russian and Iranian strategic planning, supplies, fighters, and diplomatic backing for its week-to-week survival. Ditto for the idea that Russian or Iranian officers inside Syria gave their approval for such an attack without the blessing of the men at the top of their own chains of command: Ali Khamenei in Iran, and Vladimir Putin in Russia.

He continues his line of reasoning by invoking Putin's KGB training, and the tactic of provocation:


Among students of the rougher techniques used by fascists, communists, and other old-fashioned political actors whose names rarely appear on ballots in contemporary Western democracies, the nerve-gas attack in Damascus is what’s known as a provocation. In the aesthetics of power that Putin learned from his instructors in the KGB, and that they learned from both their Leninist teachers and the Nazi enemy in WWII, a good provocation is a thing of beauty—a sinister and mind-bending event designed to elicit a response that will serve as a pretext for a predetermined course of action directed toward a larger strategic goal.

One of the classic aims of provocation as a technique is to alter the context in which future action takes place; the aggressor looks like he is defending himself, while the injured party looks like the aggressor. One major aim of this reversal is to disorient and demoralize the victim as well as anyone who is watching, a situation that often leads to paralysis, which further augments the aggressor’s tactical advantage. Some classic examples of provocation include the burning of the Reichstag, which was provoked by the Gestapo and led to Hitler’s formal seizure of power in Germany...A more recent example of the technique can arguably be found in the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow by Chechen terrorists—attacks that may have been sanctioned by the FSB for the purpose of bringing Putin to power.

And what would the goal of Putin be in causing Assad to cross the red line into atrocity? 

The point of the attack is to publically [sic] expose Obama’s deep ambivalence about the use of force to stop Iran. If Obama’s red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria can fall so easily, after the public deaths of more than 1,000 innocent people, including hundreds of children who died foaming at the mouth, how many cruise missiles might Iran’s putative acquisition of nuclear weapons capacity cost? Two hundred? One hundred? Zero? The answer now is plain: However many missiles they might fire, America has no stomach for fighting a war in Syria, let alone in Iran.

The capstone of the author's supposition is that this will enable Putin to take advantage of the "leadership void" in the Middle East. That is, having crossed the red line to taunt Obama into action, a failure to act will signal a future ambivalence toward Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.

This is an interesting observation, given that Obama has stressed that Congressional authorization of force would be as effective if used "today" as it would if used "next week." Charlie Cook, of National Journal, speculating about Obama's last-minute decision to ask for Congressional approval says:

Friday night, Obama got cold feet and pulled back, deciding to seek congressional approval after all. To many, Obama's lurching suggests that he was weak, inconsistent, and indecisive, a pretty bad combination for the person heading up the world's largest superpower. But perhaps Obama was following the admonition of Shakespeare's Falstaff in Henry IV that discretion is the better part of valor. Putting aside the substantive policy question whether we should or should not punish Syria for its apparent use of chemical weapons with a surgical and proportionate attack—and there are plenty of meritorious arguments on both sides of that question—what if he just changed his mind? Are presidents allowed to second-guess themselves and change their minds if they conclude that a previous or tentative decision was made in error? Some might suggest that the country would have been better served had President Johnson acted on what we are now learning of his own increasing reservations about the wisdom of the Vietnam War. Should glands trump brains and judgment?

I think the G-20 meeting this week will prove interesting.