Posted on 11/18/2015 7:39:54 AM PST by Trumpinator
Moscow’s brazen intervention in the Syrian civil war on behalf of the beleaguered Assad regime was laughed off by Western leaders as folly. In another effort to deflect from his myriad failures in the region, Barack Obama insisted that Putin had committed Russian soldiers and heavy weapons to a “quagmire.†American political commentators suggested that Russia might have stumbled into a second Afghanistan. Support for Putin’s regime would ebb, they said, as the Russian Federation bled itself white on Syria’s battlefields. These commentators forgot that Russia would only experience a second Afghanistan so long as the West was willing to make Syria into a killing ground for Russian troops. It was not.
The hope that the Western world might impose on Syria some punishment for violating the norms that prohibit the battlefield use of chemical weapons is forever lost now. Putin’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, too, is unlikely to be resolved now on terms favorable to the West. The hundreds of Russian souls who perished over the skies of Egypt after an ISIS-linked bomb destroyed their civilian aircraft render Moscow a functional ally in the war against ISIS, but that is a temporary alliance borne out of convenience. Russia and the West continue to be at cross purposes in the region, and Moscow now finds itself holding the best hand.
"Mr. Putin had to go into Syria not out of strength, but out of weakness," Obama averred in October. He was only fooling himself. In the short term, it is Putin who is operating from a position of strength in Syria while the American-led alliance finds itself on its heels.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Could be, but it is a widely held opinion. OTOH, your opinion is very narrow.
I posted actual Russians commenting. So I answered your question via their words.
He absolutely has won.
Let’s just take Syria as a example.
To set this up, both Iran and Russia have been exploiting ISIS. They both have different goals, Iran wants control of Iraq, Russia wants to save Assad and further expand it’s area of influence while at the same time, sticking it to NATO and the US as well as Europe to a lesser degree.
Russia exploited ISIS activity as a reason for entering Syria. They then set about helping Assad’s forces in whatever way they could, but only occasionally attacking ISIS and likely only to cement their cover story.
Now you have the French beginning to come to the Putin party and sit down at the growing list of countries at the bar.
As Putin’s sphere of influence grows, the US and NATO shrinks in influence.
It’s been a win/win for Putin, and a lose/lose for the US and Obama as well as Europe (because they are dependent on NATO).
So who is the better chess player?
lol.....too funny...and yet there is a Putin fan base here in the US rooting him on. Obama will only be in office for another year plus several weeks of packing up the White House china..
I wonder who they will be rooting after he is done screwing up this country for decades. Will it be the US, or Putin? One can plainly see that all those “Gorbasms” did no good..
This is what they do. It’s what they have always done.
Why don’t you just hold that question until the next annexation.
We’ll find out in 10 years. One of the general problems with the Middle East is a general lack of good guys. Sure Putin is bombing ISIS and The Brotherhood, but he’s backing a guy that gasses is own people. And he’s stepped into a region that’s been at a pretty constant state of civil unrest for a very long time. If he’s hoping for a quick resolution and exit he’s likely to be rather disappointed.
Wow, you actually believe that was Assad and not the rebels staging it to set up a bombing of Assad by the USA?
It’s not like that was the first scuzzy thing Assad has done. Like his father he’s got a long list of bad behavior, including supporting the Shia uprising in Iraq that killed US forces.
He is quite simply not a good guy.
Using poison gas on civilians will not be the firs scuzzy thing anti-Assad rebels have done either. Sunni Muslims aided the Iraqi uprising against American forces also.
True. As I said in my first post: One of the general problems with the Middle East is a general lack of good guys.
And sometimes the enemy or your enemy is just as much of a rotten SOB. Actually quite often in the Mid-East.
I do think that 0bama and our State Department have lost, or rather, performed so badly one might wonder if they even realized what game they were playing. Had anyone asked me in 2008 I would have said it were impossible to make the Middle East more chaotic and violent than it already was. Unbelievably, they've managed precisely that.
If this is a victory then, it's a victory by default. That's pretty shameful.
Better a strong man who keeps things in order than this Sunni rabble.
A - that’s the path to fascism.
B - he hasn’t kept things in order. Syria has been a mess for his entire reign.
Basically you’re saying you prefer a rotten scumbag murdered who has a history of violently opposing the US to a rabble of rotten scumbag murders who have a history of violently opposing the US. I’m pointing out that they all suck and NONE of them deserve our support. The best “solution” to Syria for the US is that they keep fighting each other for 10 or 15 years in a pointless war of attrition that leaves them all incapable of harming us.
That’s been the saving grace, that Muslims tend to fight each other more than they fight the infidel.
I rather have a Generalissimo Franco type ruling a fractured country like Syria. Either that or the world undoes the borders that were drawn from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to reflect ethnic and religious divisions which is a taboo concept. Even then I don’t think a rearranged border set up would calm these Arabs down.
If not for the Christians left in their midst and the tendency for these Muslims to target the west I would grab popcorn and watch.
My “joke” solution to the Mid-East (which seems more practical every day) is an Escape From New York style wall, nothing goes in, nothing comes out, wait until our satellites detect no explosions for a period of 5 years. It would be really expensive in the short term, but in the long run it would be cheaper, keep all their crap self contained and we wouldn’t have to worry if we should be picking sides.
Right, because the Cold War clearly shows there’s no negative side effects to siding with scumbags. Saddam did a great job keeping things calm in Iraq... and funding international terrorism.
Nothing is going to calm them down but time. History has shown they just like killing each other. A strong leader can calm down a region for a while (with lots of murder), but eventually he’ll lose power even if just by dying, then all that crap comes to the surface again. One of these days, maybe, the region will evolve. Europe used to be a lot like that too, and grew out of it. Until then we’d really probably be better off acknowledging that in most Mid-East conflict both sides are psychotic and we really don’t care who wins because they won’t make things any better.
Well.. the game is not over but at this point I'd say the score is:
Putin 106
Obama 0
I don't buy the neocon lie that the world is better off without Saddam. Iraq certainly was better off with him in power. The Saddam problem could have been solved by getting a coup going and replacing Saddam with a vetted general from the regime. No nation building, no histrionics, no thousands of dead GIs.
You should explain to Israel how they’d be better off with the guy who fed a million dollars a year into the Intifada still alive.
If Saddam could have been solved with a coup he would have been before we ever showed up. And of course making a directed coup where we hand pick the replacement has a long history of failing miserably (hint, Cuba, 3 times, no really).
You really need to read up on the Cold War. We have a long history of doing everything you think is a good idea, and all that history proves is that those ideas are stupid and cost lives. Ours and theirs.
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