When it became apparent that someone needed to bomb the daylights out of ISIS, Barack Obama wasn’t interested because, as we all know, Climate Change is much more urgent.
So, Vladimir Putin was all too eager to help, but help from the Russians has never been free. The last time we decided to let the Russians do a significant share of the fighting for us in a war, Eastern Europe paid dearly for that help by spending the next forty four years behind the Iron Curtain.
General Patten didn’t trust the Russians then, and we shouldn’t put too much trust in them now, because the Russians never do anything unless they’ve first calculated how it’s going to advance their own interests.
Obama believes that getting involved in military conflicts will hurt Democrats politically, but abdicating the leadership role on the world stage will not just make the battles go away. Someone’s going to fight them, and that someone sets the agenda for the world’s direction once the battle is won. What the Russians understand is that to the winner goes the spoils, and if ISIS is eliminate on their terms then the peace will proceed on their terms as well.
Obama should have learned this when he withdrew from Iraq in 2011. He forfeited the opportunity to influence what happened there, and ISIS took full advantage while Obama was smugly writing them off as the JV team. Unfortunately, Obama never learns anything.
You may be rooting for the Russians and praising Putin now because they’re doing the work we should be doing. The upside is of course, fewer American lives at risk, but, you won’t like what happens when the Russians demand the price.
In the aftermath of the Turkish military shooting down a Russian air force plane, the killing of its pilot and attacking a Russian rescue helicopter, the violence between those two nations is becoming more intensified.
On Thanksgiving Day, Russian air strikes blasted trucks which were transporting weapons and equipment from NATO member Turkey to the Muslim terrorists fighting in Syria.
Moscow reports that President Vladimir Putin is fully mobilized to tackle what the Kremlin regards as an unprecedented threat from Turkey following the shooting down of one of its warplanes by a Turkish F-16, the Russian leader's spokesman said on Saturday.
In comments which underscore how angry the Kremlin still is over the incident, Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, called the behavior of the Turkish air force "absolute madness" and said Ankara's subsequent handling of the crisis had reminded him of the "theater of the absurd." "Nobody has the right to traitorously shoot down a Russian plane from behind," Peskov told Russia's "News on Saturday" TV program, calling Turkish evidence purporting to show the Russian SU-24 jet had violated Turkish air space "cartoons".
According to the Kremlin's website, Putin called for sanctions against Turkey this morning. (Sat. Nov.28th) Also this morning Turkey issued a travel warning urging its nationals to delay non-urgent and unnecessary travel to Russia, saying Turkish travelers were facing "problems" in the country. It said Turks should delay travel plans until "the situation becomes clear." I don’t know about everybody else, but to me, the situation becomes less clear each day.
No comments:
Post a Comment