Putin and the Syria Conspiracy-Theory Problem: The New Yorker With the opening of the G20 summit in St. Petersburg this week, Vladimir Putin has been busy. Believing President Obama to be indecisive as well as conscience-stricken about his choices on Syria, apparently, Putin wants to slow him down. On Wednesday, he gave an interview in which he said that he would not oppose the use of force against Bashar al-Assad, his Syrian client, if the U.S. case that Assad's regime had used chemical weapons was airtight and convincing - "I do not exclude it" - but that it should be presented to the U.N. and voted on there first. It was a coup d'theatre, for on the surface Putin's offer made him look - if you hadn't been following the story - like an alarmed elder statesman concerned with due process in the face of cowboy Obama's heedless rush to war. He took a more aggressive tone when he described, to his Human Rights Council, watching Secretary of State John Kerry's testimony before the Senate: "This was very unpleasant and surprising for me. We talk to them and we assume they are decent people, but he is lying and he knows that he is lying. This is sad. The next day, he greeted Obama when he arrived for the summit. The two men shook hands, but the situation was such that the seating arrangements were changed to keep them farther apart. Still, with the White House facing an uphill battle in rallying Congress, in spite of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote in favor of a military-action resolution on Wednesday, Obama may feel he has little choice but to placate Putin - to continue providing "more proof," politely asking for his acquiescence, even if it means waiting a little longer for the campaign to begin. But the question of proof and trust goes beyond Putin. One of the main problems with proposed American military action in Syria is Washington's inability thus far to control its message internationally. The minute Obama began proposing strikes in response to the use of chemical weapons, much of the world's news coverage, not to mention the political blame game abroad, shifted from Assad's culpability to the prospect of U.S. "aggression." And somewhere there, in limbo, it remains. There are a good number of people in the world who still believe that Syria is telling the truth with its denials of using chemical weapons, and that the United States is simply lying about what it knows. This is a real problem for Obama, and one that must be tackled head on. The disconnect is eloquent testimony to the degree to which the U.S. has undermined its own credibility in the wake of the false W.M.D. claims made in the run-up to the war against Saddam Hussein a decade ago. In the succeeding years, it has become a globally shared perception that the U.S. had other reasons to invade Iraq - that it has never come clean about its real motivations. With the ongoing N.S.A. revelations in the air, there is a sense that the United States is an all-seeing, all-knowing power, determined to preserve its hegemony. It's worth recalling that, right after the attacks outside of Damascus on August 21st, Assad's regime flatly denied that they had taken place; then, with the evidence mounting, it said that any attack had been launched by the rebels - aimed at their own families - in order to trigger U.S. military intervention. As far-fetched as such talk sounds, it meshes neatly with the world views of those inclined to believe long-standing and widespread anti-American conspiracy theories in which America's past wars were all triggered by nefariously plotted own-goal attacks, from the sinking of the battleship Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin and on to 9/11, in order to justify Yankee military action. Osama bin Laden was a C.I.A. agent, of course, as was Saddam Hussein - and that poor fool Morsi. The point behind all of these theories is to reaffirm an essential paranoia about America's place in the world. To back up its "the rebels did it" claim, the Assad regime professed to have "discovered" chemical weapons cached in rebel tunnels, which had affected its soldiers. There are several Western reporters in Damascus; surely any chemically wounded soldiers would have been made available by now for interviews, or doctors" test results produced. In these fast-breaking situations, the point of disinformation is the effect achieved by a quick-hit assertion; before there's time for follow-up clarifications or acknowledgments of error, the intended damage has been inflicted. It is the war-propaganda equivalent of rope-a-dope: stay on your feet until the bell rings, and you may just survive to the next round. Something else: At any time since the chemical attacks, has Assad expressed any feelings of sorrow for those killed in them, including the many children? Did I miss a statement of regret? Even if Assad's lack of compassion doesn't demonstrate his complicity in the atrocities, it says a great deal about the character of his regime. In this context, it is worth noting that, however dangerous a possible response by Iran to American military action may be, its government - at least the part of it controlled by the newly elected President, Hassan Rouhani (if not by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei) - at least had the decency to "totally and vigorously condemn" the use of chemical weapons in Syria. But it remained agnostic about who the perpetrators were; given that Iran, along with Russia, is the most hands-on sponsor of the Assad regime, this is telling - a silent indictment. Iranians have suffered more than any other people in modern times from the horrors of chemical warfare. During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, Saddam repeatedly used chemicals against Iran's soldiers (as well as Kurdish civilians), and not only denied their use but blamed Iran - much as Assad has blamed his opponents in Syria - for using them. Former President Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who ruled Iran from 1989 to 1997, said on Monday that Assad's regime, not the rebels, was responsible for the August 21st attack. Apparently, Rafsanjani's remarks implicating Assad were later altered from official Iranian press communiqués so as not to place blame. The Iranian position is nuanced, but suggests that there may, at the very least, be a slim opening for some behind-the-scenes diplomacy, and who knows - perhaps even a stand-down position for Assad as a last-ditch measure to forestall a military attack by the United States and France. There is a good piece by Robert Worth in Tuesday's Times on the possibility that quiet diplomacy may already be taking place between Iran and the U.S. It's possible that even Vladimir Putin, for all his bluster, may be willing to accept a face-saving climb-down scenario if he is "shown the proof" he so obstreperously demands. Putin, throughout Syria's turmoil, has been Assad's facilitator, one of his chief suppliers of weapons, and has played the spoiler at the U.N., vetoing (seconded by the opportunistic Chinese) every measure aimed at curbing the mayhem. Already, Putin has sent a reconnaissance ship, the Priazovye, in a convoy to the eastern Mediterranean, "to gather current information in the area of the escalating conflict," according to a Russian military official quoted by the Interfax news agency. But the St. Petersburg summit still may provide a timely venue for negotiations that might lead, if not to peace, than to something less than the disaster scenario the world now faces. If, on the other hand, Putin and Assad's other backers cannot be prevailed upon to bring him around - and, sadly, it seems unlikely that they will - then what we will have instead in Syria is a larger and more dangerous war, with unforeseeable consequences. The U.N. announced this week that a third of Syria's population is now displaced by the war, with two million refugees calculated to have fled to neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon. It has become, officially, the worst refugee crisis in the world. That's a reality that no state of denial or conspiracy theory can erase. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP