Putin is Assad (Offside) Again

Putin is 'off side' in Syria now, as well as in EUkrainia. Russian 'interference' in Syria is starting to bother America. Just yesterday the US had to complain that Putin was giving Assad the 'red carpet treatment' on his first visit outside Iraq in 4 years. I expect they would have preferred the Russians 'shirtfront' him over the barrel bombs and ostracize him into leaving office. For the first, and most annoying, aspect of that Russian interference has been an insistence on maintaining Assad in power, in contravention of everything else good and holy that's been going on in Syria.  Assad you see has been busily killing 'everybody' that ISIS hasn't already killed.

Add to that a rumor that the Iraqi government was preparing to ask the same kind of Russian assistance for its war on terror and you have America 'hitting back'. "It's him or me, Delores"  or something like that General Joe Dunford - Marine tough guy and US Chief of Staff is supposed to have told the Iraqi government. There is only room for one good-guy (or 65 of them)  in Iraq's GWOT. If Russia wants to help fight ISIS in Iraq, the USA will be taking its 'balls' home. What in the heck are the other 65 'independent' nations who've seen the sunny side of the need to fight terror in Iraq going to do?  Are they going home on the freedom bird, too?  That would sort of make a big fat lie - or expose a nasty truth -  about 'growing democracy and freedom' and rebuilding damaged lands. I think there would be a whole whack of people in a number of first world countries looking at their boys being used as America's cannon fodder, and changing the regimes that pretend independent action but really just sell-out to Washington. Something like this could put the kibosh on NATO.

Our way or the Other way?

Since Putin started his Syrian campaign the world is missing the blow-by-blows we've come to expect with serious military operations. That could be good reason,  for such 'reporting', later,has often failed to meet any criterion for truth. The results have certainly not borne out the 'descriptions' of 'vic'try'.   Assad has LEFT Syria for the first time in four years.  Maybe something is changing and we just haven't heard about it.  And maybe the Iraqis have.

Maybe 'getting it done' have a very different meaning in US English and in Russian.  Or the 'it' part is completely different between the two.

 It's obvious, given 14 years of the best warfare money money can buy,  that something hasn't been done right, or at all. Who needs a multi-national  coalition if  the strategy and tactics are clear and unimpeded by massive economic 'disruption'?

That trip to Moscow?  Another 'bust' for US intel.  They didn't know he'd gone until he was back in Damascus. And he flew through US-controlled airspace - a war zone - to get there.

Assad's Flight into Russia