Mosul and the ISIS bunch there need to be taken out.
Assad needs to be taken out also.
The situations are not unconnected.
Assad and his new little Buddy Putin are NOT fighters for freedom.
Assad is a brutal, savage, vicious dictator, every bit as vile as Saddam Hussein, and a man who was in league with Saddam. He is waging a war of extermination against his own people.
Putin is a very shrewd, intelligent individual taking advantage of a mess created mainly by Obama. His objective is not to launch a crusade against ISIS, but to control the energy production of the Middle East and,by extension, Europe, OPEC and a good part of the rest of the world.
By maintaining Assad in power in Syria, controlling Yemen through Iranian supported Houthis, and occupying Iraq with his allies the Iranians, he will accomplish the above.
He has also weakened the west by forcing a massive migration out of Syria and the Middle East into Europe.
The Russians will have military basis in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.
They will then control Saudi Arabia, the Suez Canal and energy flow to the west from there, along with that produced domestically in Russia.
Stop portraying Putin as a hero. He is an enemy who is out to control us.
How are we going to “take out” all these people? We don’t even know where most of them are and their alliances are constantly shifting so it’s not like we can surgically remove them.
We’d have to have blitzkrieg warfare over a vast territory killing hundreds of thousands if not millions. We would then have a vast territory we could not hold. We don’t even have enough military personnel to hold Iraq much less a much larger region.
Then there is Russia and Iran.
Russia has been right in opposing the faux 'Arab Spring'.
I don't see them as enemies and applaud them in their attempt to straighten out what we messed up.
Putin is in this moment of history is a God sent.
I did not say Putin is a hero.
He is working in his own and his countries best interests.
But he is smarter than we have been. He is not messing around with all this “nation building” stuff.
Russia has a manpower problem as well. They do not have enough military personnel to ‘hold’ vast tracts of territory. That’s why they are just trying to control a small area of the coast in Syria. They want access to the ports primarily. They don’t want to hold Aleppo or Mosul or vast tracts of land. That would be stupid