Russia’s Rise in Mideast Creates Enemies

Since entering the Syrian war last year, Russia successfully ended America’s status as the Middle East’s sole superpower, an achievement capped by the fall of Aleppo.

That rise has turned Moscow into the region’s indispensable power broker. In Europe, too, the migrant wave unleashed by the Syrian war strengthened Moscow’s sway, fueling populist parties friendly to President Vladimir Putin.

The assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey on Monday, however, highlighted the flip side of this dizzying rise. As America’s influence has shrunk, Russia has taken the place the U.S. long occupied in the minds of many people in the Middle East: an alien imperialist power seen as waging war on Muslims and Islam.

There haven’t been any recent anti-American protests in the region. But amid the agony of Aleppo, tens of thousands of protesters converged this month outside Russian missions from Istanbul to Beirut to Kuwait City—where the chanting, led by local lawmakers, was clear: “Russia is the enemy of Islam.”

What do you suppose Putin and the Russians were thinking watching the West expand NATO to their border, the US government actively interfere in the Ukraine and Crimea. They also watched while we dismantled their client states, under facile pretenses in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

The covert games played by the Obama-Clinton regime with McCain/Grahams’ active assistance were stupid. Like it or not we are going to have to find a way to coexist with the Russians. Since the end of WW 2 we had a policy of “well we don’t like the fact the Russians are here or there but there really is nothing we can do about it.

The Russians are reacting the same way we did over Cuba and Nicaragua. Hell we invaded Grenada in 1983 largely to stop a Soviet bomber base getting built by the Cubans.

The US under Obama-Clinton, with McCain/Grahams’ active assistance, has been aggressively pissing in Russian’s sand box.

Libya and Syria were no threat to US Security. Our dismantling their client in Libya and trying to in Syria looks like a deliberate provocation to them. The Russians don’t buy the “humanitarian” argument. They think we are trying aggressively to expand our sphere of influence at their expense. Why do you think the “intelligence agents” spirited out of Allepo this week were 95% Saudi?

These are the same sort of stupid geo political games that helped start World War 1.

You really need to get out of your 1980s era world view and learn how vastly different the world is now.

Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union with million of conscripted slave solider sitting in armored fighting vehicles waiting to rush the Fulda Gap and crush the free West.

At best Putin can be an irritant to the wolrd body politics. He has neither the economic, nor military, strength to be a real threat to the West.

We face the same problem now that we faced during WW2. We have an existential threat to our existence (Islamic Fascism) that is also the enemies of the Russians. The Russians are not our ivory pure clean as snow perfect allies but they are, potentially, our allies in this fight.

It easy to pompously pronounce anathema on everyone else in the world for not being perfectly politically pure enough from the safety of your keyboard in your moms basement.

Too bad for you those short of childish fantasies of perfect moral purity are ridiculous absurdities in the real world of international politics and diplomacy.

I don’t know why you’re in your mom’s basement, little Johnnie. Most of what I read that really matters is classified. You can be as ignorant of Putin’s Russia, his threats to NATO nations and neutral ones, his murders in Russia, his mass murder in Syria, his cyber warfare, his ongoing but undeclared war against the nation of Ukraine, and how he became president for life. I get that. You’re comfortable with your Obama quote and Obamesque belifs about Putin and his Russia. Try to be a little less condescending, though, if you can. When you’re ignorant, it doesn’t help you to quote Obama and act superior.

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