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.