"Please proceed, President Putin."

John McCain beat me to the punch. Minutes ago, from the Senate floor, he quoted from David Ignatius's column this morning:

"Russia has played a horrible hand brilliantly. We folded what could have been a pretty good hand," argues Ryan Crocker, a retired U.S. diplomat who has served in nearly every hot spot in the Middle East and is among the nation’s wisest analysts of the region. "The Russians were able to turn a defensive position into an offensive one because we were so completely absent."

Before listening to McCain, I also wished to quote from Ignatius's column, whose lede reads in part: "The United States hasn’t been able to organize a winning strategy to deal with the Islamic State. Maybe we should let Russian President Vladimir Putin try his hand."

That, suspects Ignatius (as I do), is President Obama's private thinking. Putin is self-inviting a bundle of backlash in a region that offers nothing but pain. By aggressively siding militarily with Syria, Iran and Baghdad's Shia, he's sucking himself into the world's deepest snake pit of sectarian animosities. His own domestic Sunni-ethnic minorities will not be pleased, not to mention the Middle East's religious majority.

As for whom McCain cited in Ignatius's column, exactly what "pretty good hand," Mr. Crocker, did Obama fold? This will become another of those phantoms that the neocons are brilliant at inventing. The temporary Iran accord was an abomination until it became the ideal to hold onto; W.'s splintered Iraq was a peaceful, happily united, altogether pleasant place until Obama withdrew our few remaining forces; and Obama's execrable Syrian predicament was actually a "pretty good" thing — until Russia escalated. Such are the fairy tales the neocons tell.

The most distasteful realpolitik to swallow is that while Bashar al-Assad is bested in tyranny by only Kim Jong-un, there is no better alternative. Not now. Ultimately, a political resolution must be negotiated. Until then, Putin is only stretching his already overstretched resources and risking some enormously ruinous blowback.

"Please proceed, President Putin." This is what I imagine is flashing in President Obama's mind. 

 

Comments

[Marc McKenzie]

It's amazing--no, scratch that, it is unsettling--to see the glee from the Putin fans in regards to Russia's actions in Syria. In their minds, the US is the real foe for supporting the rebels against Assad and that ISIL is really the fault of the US. And here's manly-man Putin to step in and fix things (at least that's the vibe I see from the Putin-loving pieces over at Consortium News).

Of course, P.M., what you've written here is closer to the truth (and I have seen similar sentiments echoed on other sites not enthralled with Putin). What seems like a bold move is in fact an overplay of a very week hand, and that Putin is stretching Russia's resources very thin.

It seems that the disastrous 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan has been flushed down the memory hole, but don't be surprised if history repeats itself.

Just my 2-cents.

[Peter G]

David Ignatius is wrong. You certainly can pass on Syria to Putin and more importantly to all the other named allies in the Middle East whose interest's so vastly exceed American interest. Our unlamented fish food adversary Bin Laden was right about one thing and that was a Sunni/Shia showdown was to be avoided at all costs until the Sunni ascendancy he envisioned made clean up on aisle Shia a winning proposition. It started too soon.

Now anybody who wade into this mess deserves what they will get. I get Putin's view. He has the dictator's perception that the West (for which read the US) is about regime change. And maybe that includes him. To be honest there is a lot of truth in it. That was what was preached from the pulpit for pretty much the whole cold war. This is his miscalculation and he has chosen just the wrong place to demonstrate the Putin alternative.

Which brings me to the named expert in Ignatius' piece, retired diplomat Ryan Crocker and his eminently transparent bullshit. An appeal to authority ought to at least give some semblance of an argument from that authority and I notice it is absent. Unless of course what he meant by throwing away a pretty good hand was Congress forbidding the authorization of doing exactly what Putin is about to do, use air strikes in Syria. He surely could not mean the use of large numbers of ground forces for that would be idiotic.

[Turgidson]

The unprovable lament that there was a window of opportunity in which the US could have acted in Syria to depose Assad and preempt ISIS is well-established with the neocons and even some more liberal-interventionist types. Maybe there was, but I doubt it. And I am grateful that Barack Obama, and not one of the armchair generals, has been president these recent years, and has studiously avoided entangling us there outside of some airstrikes on ISIS.

He gets zero credit for it, but his move to throw the decision to bomb Assad over chemical weapons back to the GOP congress was excellent. Turn the GOP's knee-jerk obstructionism to his advantage for once, and let them prevent him from doing something he clearly didn't want to do anyway. And his willingness to work with the Russians to dispose of those weapons without military action was equally so.

If Putin wants to strut into Syria and fix things, my view is he's welcome to try. If he succeeds, maybe Syria's condition actually improves (though Assad would remain, which is tragic). If he fails, he'll bog Russia down in its own Mesopotamian quagmire and weaken his freedom to cause mischief in other venues. Either of those outcomes holds advantages for us.

[shsavage]

A reader over at TPM has produced a very lucid assessment of the situation: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-on-the-disintegration-of-syria