The agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry announced with Russia to reduce the killing in Syria has widened an increasingly public divide between Mr. Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who has deep reservations about the plan for American and Russian forces to jointly target terrorist groups.
Even the White House seems wary of the deal:
“I think we’d have some reasons to be skeptical that the Russians are able or are willing to implement the arrangement consistent with the way it’s been described,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Monday at a briefing. He added, darkly, “But we’ll see.”
One major worry is letting the Russians see the big board:
Chief among Pentagon concerns is whether sharing targeting information with Russia could reveal how the United States uses intelligence to conduct airstrikes, not just in Syria but in other places, which Moscow could then use for its own advantage in the growing confrontations undersea and in the air around the Baltics and Europe.
Which is what I was worried about when this nonsense was proposed:
Oh, and the Russians will get a nice close look from the inside at how our Air Force conducts combat operations. The Russians won't take notes on that insight, now will they?
Kerry really wants the Russians in our command center?
Oh, and in what is now standard operating procedures for this administration (back to the NYT link), we can't see the deal:
It is a measure of the sensitivity of the agreement — for Washington, for Moscow and for an array of other countries and opposition groups — that the State Department has not released text of the agreement with the Russians, or even a fact sheet summarizing it.
I do not like the deal that Kerry inked with Lavrov that will lead to joint American-Russian air campaign planning.
It is a deal to help Assad survive the civil war.
