Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the recent U.S. strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad to George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
“This resembles very much the situation of 2003 and the war in Iraq,” Putin said during a press conference Tuesday. “First of all, there was a campaign launched in Iraq and it finished with the destruction of the country, the growth of the terrorist threat and the emergence of [the Islamic State] on the international arena.”
That statement continued a line of criticism Russia and its allies are making in front of the United Nations, as they cast doubt on U.S. and Western European conclusions that Assad’s regime is responsible for the April 4 chemical weapons attack. The Bolivian government invoked the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction during Friday’s security council meeting and Putin suggested that the Unired States might stage a chemical weapons attack to justify another bombing of Syria.
“We have information that a similar provocation is being prepared … in other parts of Syria including in the southern Damascus suburbs where they are planning to again plant some substance and accuse the Syrian authorities of using [chemical weapons],” he said Tuesday.
Russian military forces were deployed in support of Assad at the base that housed the chemical weapons used in the most recent attack, according to U.S. officials. “At this time, there is no U.S. intelligence community consensus that Russia had foreknowledge of the Syrian chemical attack,” a senior administration official told reporters Monday night.
Putin made that accusation while standing alongside Italian President Sergio Mattarella, who was notably traveling in Moscow even as his home country hosted a G-7 summit that produced several Western statements critical of Russia.
“Of course, we talked about relations between Russia and the European Union,” Putin told reporters. “We believe that the restoration of business ties between them on the principles of equality and mutual respect would be in everyone’s interest.”
Putin has been engaged in a diplomatic push to convince Italy to walk away from the economic sanctions that Italy and the rest of the G-7 countries agreed to impose in response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Mattarella’s trip took place just weeks after Italy’s top diplomat went to Moscow for meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that troubled congressional lawmakers.
“NATO countries have to be smart to avoid his nonsense,” New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the Washington Examiner last month. “Now there are going to be times where countries are going to do … things that we think are ridiculous. And that’s what’s happening here.”
Tillerson used the G-7 summit to place a heavy share of the blame for last week’s attack on Russian shoulders, as he recalled that Putin pledged to remove Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile from Syria in 2013. “It is unclear whether Russia failed to take this obligation seriously or Russia has been incompetent, but this distinction doesn’t much matter to the dead,” Tillerson said. “We can’t let this happen again.”
