Russian President Vladimir Putin spiked the football in President Obama’s face Wednesday by capping his diplomatic victory in the Syria crisis with a New York Times op-ed article denouncing US plans to bomb his buddy Bashar al-Assad.
“The potential strike by the United States against Syria . . . will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders,” Putin wrote.
The Times piece, published online on the 9/11 anniversary, even raised the specter of terror.
“A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism,” he wrote. “There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government.”
He also contradicted Obama’s insistence that Assad was behind a chemical attack on civilians that killed more than 1,400.
“There is every reason to believe [chemical weapons were] used not by the Syrian army, but by opposition forces,” he wrote.
The Russian leader has been credited with helping Obama save face on Syria, after the president’s call to strike the Middle Eastern nation in response to the chemical attack ran into strong congressional opposition.
Putin offered to help broker a deal in which Assad places his chemical weapons under international control.
He ended the article, his second Times op-ed following one in 1999, by saying he has a “growing trust” with Obama.
Putin’s editorial jab at the president came hours after Sen. John McCain said Obama was falling for a Syrian “rope-a-dope” by considering the Russian-brokered peace plan.
“Put me down as extremely skeptical,” said McCain (R-Ariz.), who supports the Syrian rebels. “I worry we have a kind of a game of rope-a-dope for a while and the slaughter goes on.”
His grim forecast came as the UN revealed eight more massacres committed by the Assad regime and one by the rebels since 2012.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that United States has begun getting weapons into Syrian rebel hands.
The weapons package is being funded and organized by the CIA, the paper said, and has been arriving over the past couple of weeks. The weapons, however, are not American-made, the paper said.