The West is being blindsided by the true threat of Russia

The Economist ran a feature this week called "Putinism", with the following ominous graphic, which is a very good indicator of what the Western "mainstream" thinks of not just the Russian strongman, but of Russia as a whole.

Unfortunately, at a time when the credibility of Western capitalism itself is under the greatest strain in living memory - when The Economist's local tender, the British pound, is itself plunging towards virtual parity with the dollar (even as the Russian ruble firms up with oil prices) - this kind of reporting on Putin's Russia only reinforces the deep ethnocentrism and ideological skew that the Anglo-American elite is ever more on the defensive about. It really goes to show how the big bankers and media bosses of London and New York are the ones who feel perhaps even more under siege these days than Putin and his inner circle in the Kremlin.

The inherent subtext of this kind of Putin-bashing (and Russia-bashing, to be quite honest) is as questionable as it is blatant: Western "free market democracy" is the only valid system, and Russia must still copy it to the hilt or be left behind in the dark ages.

Only this time, the joke could really be on the Western ruling class and not its Russian equivalent. The public can't be fooled as easily anymore by the stranglehold of "mainstream" corporate-controlled media. If Putin's Russia were so weak and cowardly whereas the West were still so strong both materially and morally, just why is Moscow on a regional rampage in both Europe and the Middle East at the expense of NATO and the US?

This isn't at all to suggest that Russia isn't in fact weak and vulnerable: it clearly is. Only apparently not as much as the feckless and disoriented West.

From Putin on down, the Russian elite and people alike seem to enjoy the most enduring strength of any country: unity. Sure, this is largely a function of ruthless repression of dissent, but even the West can't deny that this itself is only possible because of a huge apparatus of support for Putinism that's staffed by millions of ordinary Russian citizens who apparently share their leader's hardline views.

Even as The Economist and other mouthpieces of the transatlantic plutocracy have increasingly lamented the spectacular failures of their social-engineering schemes of non-Western societies since the end of the Cold War, they still speak as though somehow this hasn't damaged the validity of the very notion that the world should and must become a carbon copy of the liberal-universalist West. And even less do they seem to recognize that it's precisely this arrogant defensiveness that's exposed them to a groundswell of revolt even by their own purportedly "free" subjects.

No, Russia's not a society in decline: the West is. The low birthrate in Russia - which has already long since leveled off - is not a failure of Russian values but evidence of Western decadence. The country's sexual promiscuity, high abortion rate, and so on are of primarily Western import - not a poor reflection of traditional Russian spirituality and morality. It is precisely these family-destroying forces which act and spread in the name of "liberation" that Putinism is rightly trying to roll back and smash, whether across the vast Russian empire itself or in its muscular interventionism in the Muslim world.

It is Russia, not the West, which has belatedly found - largely through its much-reviled Chechen counterinsurgency - a kind of correct balanced approach to the conundrum of fundamentalist Islam that Western liberal triumphalism will never willfully embrace: a loose federalism which gives "Sharia-ism" sufficient space for limited localized expression, overseen by local but loyal vassals of undeniably and unabashedly Islamist strain.

The West cannot fathom such a compromise: if you're not "with us", you're "against us" - read: either you fully copy our model of "free markets" and "civil society", which in practice mean gender-relational anarchy and consumerist-materialist dissipation and nihilism, or you're worthy of extermination like Saddam and Qaddafi.

That of course doesn't prevent the West from making its bed with radical head-chopping jihadists where it sees fit: as the Syrian conflict conclusively proves, Western elites have no qualms aiding and abetting LGBT roof-hurlers (Al Qaeda-linked terrorists) against LGBT protectors (the Assad regime) so long as it furthers their true designs of weakening the real competition for global supremacy - Russia and its emergent authoritarian axis of China, Iran, and now increasingly Turkey and the rest of the West-disillusioned Arab-Islamic world.

To conclude, the West is correct that Putinism is a repudiation of its own hypocrisies and shortfalls in living up to its own stated integrity and consistency of morality. It's wrong and shortsighted, however, to simply dismiss Russia as not standing for anything more substantive of its own accord, even if not particularly positive: Russia is setting itself up once more as the West's Vengeance from Above, the Eastern Assyria or Babylon raised up to chastise - by fire - the hopelessly wayward Whore of the Western Jerusalem.

This could well be just the kick in the rear the West needs to get its act together again. Better yet, we in the West can always hope and pray that this Babylon will itself be swallowed up by Persia: a far more enlightened and benign absolutism than we're inclined to think even possible, which inspires even ourselves to pay closer heed to our own fidelity to genuine progress and progressivism. (No speculation will be proffered here as to Russia's actual evolving partnership and quasi-alliance with Iran.)

Russia and Turkey divvying up Syria apace, but will Saudis and Americans play along?

Putin and Erdogan are ever more obviously carving up Syria into respective Russian and Turkish zones of security dominance; the question now becomes just how they'll proceed to eventually stabilize what remains a highly tense and volatile situation.

From Russia's perspective, the divided city of Aleppo will be key: its shrinking and besieged eastern sector, even if eventually cleared of the former Al Nusra Front and affiliated radical jihadists, will still be under threat by such militants who will have been reconcentrated in adjoining Idlib province. Moscow would thus love to see Ankara exert its influence and leverage over virtually the entire spectrum of rebel factions in the Aleppo theater to reshuffle the strength and alignment of these groups such that they'll settle for a frozen front both in the city itself and in the surrounding countryside, thus securing the government-held western districts of the former in what would be a Jerusalem or Berlin-style partition arrangement.

Since Erdogan has already offered some token agreement to Putin on the importance of separating Al Nusra from "moderate" opposition groups still under the nominal banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - precisely the pledge that the US has chronically failed to deliver on - it follows that his interest is to negotiate the withdrawal of extremists from Aleppo city so that they can be replaced by more Russian-palatable FSA. These units would then quit their dream of conquering the government-held western districts, thereby securing said frozen front for Assad which the dictator in Damascus can plausibly accept as the restarting point for the diplomatic peace process.

Mr. Erdogan should realize that this partial victory is the best he can hope for with regards to Aleppo: any more aiding and abetting of the hardcore jihadists in their drive to conquer the whole city is likely to ultimately backfire, i.e. meet such determined Russian-backed Syrian regime resistance that it will only further squeeze the rebel eastern pocket in the city proper while expanding the buffer zone of the government siege ring. If he's serious about his new rapprochement and collaboration with Putin, he should know with crystal clarity that this is where the Kremlin draws the red line: the immediate radical jihadist (i.e. Nusra and allies) threat to Aleppo must be removed permanently, else Russia will eventually switch allegiance to the Kurds, realigning with Damascus to unleash the YPG peshmerga against what's certain to be an escalated Turkish incursion against ISIS via Operation Euphrates Shield.

Stripped of its Nusra allies, the FSA will pose little threat to conquer Aleppo, and indeed its very presence in the city will be at the mercy of Assad's forces which control all supply routes into and out of it; though Assad would probably personally want to exact some measure of vengeance on them, he'd have no qualms about tolerating them for the sake of a more relaxed Aleppo sector that would free up precious manpower and resources for operations against Nusra and ISIS further afield. This uneasy coexistence founded upon Russo-Turkish security understanding will then be the basis for what can finally be a meaningful local power transition process with enforceable teeth on both sides; if a federated self-rule arrangement can be worked out for the remaining rebels of eastern Aleppo, it could be a template for the rest of the country.

Of course, all this could still be wishful thinking. While it makes sense for Putin and Erdogan to treat Aleppo as a demarcation line, it remains to be seen just how much leverage they truly exercise over their Syrian clients - especially in the latter's case. One way or another, it's the Russo-Iranian-Syrian regime-Hezbollah coalition - the Axis of Fatima - that has scored a major strategic victory which seemed all but impossible with Assad on the rocks not even a year and a half ago. The real wild card could now be whether the remaining "free" Syrian opposition - under the umbrella of the FSA - can truly be wrested away by its Turkish sponsors from the broader coalition of the Saudi-dominated Syrian High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which probably has if anything only further hardened its stance of full regime change against Damascus.

Ankara of course has the strategic and logistical advantages over Riyadh should the two find themselves at loggerheads on the matter of compromise on Assad's fate: specifically, if Erdogan finds himself wrangling with hawkish young crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. And optimistically, with the latter's war in Yemen going badly off the rails as well, the inexperienced 31-year-old hothead will finally be cornered to back down by his older relatives, who have long been smarting from his becoming de facto head of state in lieu of a senile octogenarian father. Sensibly, it's time to finally concede that the region-wide proxy war against Iran has failed - period.

But finally, that leads us back to Washington: since a factional power struggle is sure to only intensify as Saudi foreign and security policy under prince Salman continues to crumble, the ultimate trump cards in determining Riyadh's orientation in the whole region are held by the deep state of the defense, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus of the Beltway - the so-called "blob" of the DC policy elite. As the blob becomes ever more assured of a Hillary Clinton victory two weeks from today, it's clamoring ever more loudly to finally go all in on Syria by committing to a new course that can only escalate into an all-out regime change operation which it merely thinks is long overdue.

It's not that Washington has to be crazy enough to actually start a shooting war with Damascus which it knows will depend on nuclear peer Moscow basically bluffing about its vital interests in the Levant - not to mention nuclear-cajoled Tehran's: the mere fact that these lunatic proposals are still being given far less-than-lunatic treatment (let alone increasingly vociferous in their tone) betrays the depths of humiliation and rage now driving the American foreign and security policy establishment. They're the ones whose empire is crashing down like a house of cards right before their very eyes, on the watch of a lame-duck president who to them has simply thrown in the towel as opposed to very intensively determining that proposed direct American intervention can easily make things even worse.

That empire may have been purportedly based on superior morality and values, but it was always ultimately underpinned and validated only by superior application of military force and armed blackmail. The blob will starve to death without new organisms to swallow: to Washington, not going to war at this point must be even less tolerable than blundering into a losing (even suicidal) one, because at least in the second case it's actually putting its expensive tools and toys to use, whilst in the first it's merely condemning itself to obsolescence and irrelevance. You can't expect a gun and weapons nut to not prefer a stupid firefight to the ignominy of sitting on the fence. And even if you manage to constrain him, the very fact that he's still loading and cocking his wares as openly and brashly as ever sure doesn't give your dogs in the fight a reason to heed even your own requests to back down. If the next president - assume that's Hillary - is serious about peace, she'll have to silence and effectively dismember this monster once and for all: else it's damned if you do (plunge into a no-win war), damned if you don't (lose anyway because you won't kill the blob to secure a compromise with the enemy).

Russia and Turkey now colluding to carve up Syria - at US expense

As the largest Russian naval deployment since the Cold War flaunts Western impotence by sailing provocatively past the North Sea and English Channel en route to Syria, the US-equipped Turkish air force has launched a barrage of airstrikes on US-backed Kurdish rebels in the northwest of that country - a clear warning to Washington not to use the Kurds as the spearhead of any assault to recapture ISIS capital Raqqa to the east.

What's striking about the apparent collusion between Putin and Erdogan is how effectively and completely it marginalizes the West and especially the US from the coming realignment both within Syria and more broadly in the region. While Washington and Western capitals continue to haggle and babble about diplomacy and human rights, it becomes ever clearer that they have no interest whatsoever in joining the only obvious potential solution to the long civil war which has spawned ISIS and unleashed a flood of refugees which has destabilized Europe itself: a de facto partition of the country into zones of security dominance.

Since Erdogan - still nominally a US ally and NATO member - speaks Putin's language rather than the West's, he wants hard physical power on the ground (and in the air) in Syria more than anything else at this point, even if that means bargaining with the Iranians and the Assad regime itself (under the table, of course). Publicly, he can point to his stepped-up support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) "moderate" rebels in northern Syria - advancing impressively against stiffening ISIS resistance in the two-month-old "Euphrates Shield" operation - as proof that he hasn't renounced his goal of eventually ousting Assad in Damascus; privately, he has all but conceded the failure of the Syrian revolution and is almost certainly already in indirect talks with Assad about how to trade the latter's recapture of Aleppo for a longer Turkish and Turkish-backed rebel presence further north and east at the expense of the Kurds (and by extension, their US sponsors).

The steadily progressing surrenders of moderate rebels and jihadists alike in residual resistance pockets around Damascus, Homs, and elsewhere in the firmly regime-secured southwest and south-central sectors - enabling them to redeploy to the insurgent-jihadist stronghold of northwestern Idlib province while resettling their families there too - point to a template that Moscow and Damascus are now beginning to try to apply to Aleppo. As the resistance pocket in the east of that crucial city is ever more tightly constricted, Putin and Assad have been increasing their windows of "humanitarian pauses" to their aerial bombardment in the past two days to facilitate a piecemeal withdrawal of the less diehard opposition to their eventual pacification, leaving little doubt that they're leveraging Erdogan's influence over some groups to speed it up.

Of course, even with the Turkish-backed militants gone, that still leaves plenty of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorists and other hardcore Sunni fundamentalist affiliates for the next wave of assault, spearheaded by the Russian naval air group of Moscow's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to pound to a pulp with incendiaries, bunker-busters, and thermobaric missiles. With fewer residents left, though, they'll have fewer human shields in some sections of eastern Aleppo's ruined cityscape, reducing their potential strongholds even as it creates pockets of vulnerability for regime loyalist forces to prospectively exploit.

Ideally for Putin and Assad, they can get the whole Aleppo business over with by the US presidential election on November 8, but this is farfetched. Realistically - but even more cynically - they may see fit to time the ferocity of a renewed assault to correspond with the final 48 to 72 hours of the campaign for the White House. If this coincides with a stalled US-led effort to recapture Mosul as ISIS resistance stiffens against the predominantly Shiite Arab Iraqi national army (from the south) and Kurdish peshmerga (from the north), it would bode ill for what was supposed to be president Obama's outgoing foreign policy bright spot.

The Turks now hold the trump cards with respect to ISIS both in Syria and Iraq: in both countries, they enjoy more rapport with Sunni Arab fighters who must be the backbone of any eventual pacification of former caliphate territory than the US, whose Syrian ground coalition is dominated by Syrian Kurds while the Iraqi one is a partnership of Shia Arabs and Iraqi Kurds. In collusion with the Kremliln, Ankara now has a chance of making the most of a crisis that really blew up in its face starting about a year ago, when the Russian intervention in Syria reversed the fortunes of its regional power play in which it underhandedly employed ISIS as a foil against the Kurds and Iranians - with Saudi and Gulf Sunni Arab support.

And despite pro-Russian reports that Saudi Arabia and its subsidiary Gulf kingdoms have shifted their ISIS proxies from the Mosul region westward across the Syrian border, this is unlikely to have substantial sustained impact on the overall situation in the two fractured states: the Saudis surely can't relinquish their influence over one flank of ISIS simply to bolster the other - not when both are slowly but surely crumbling.

As it becomes clearer to even the Saudis that the Turks are securing their interests far more effectively by sticking their thumb in lame-duck Obama's nose, Riyadh too will be increasingly tempted to do likewise: turn to Putin, the new sheriff on the Mideast block, and invite him to broker better collective security arrangements with the other regional players. This of course will be largely contingent on just how badly the whole proxy war against Tehran continues to deteriorate, as even the Saudi-led Gulf campaign in Yemen stalls against the determined Houthi rebels, further exposing Riyadh as the big regional loser and weakening the hand of its hawkish young hothead, crown prince Muhammad bin Sultan, against his jealous older relatives.

The common denominator in all this will be as stark as it is undeniable: a sidelined US security role in a region it utterly dominated for about four decades. Whether Washington realizes it or not, its still substantial investments of military and diplomatic resources in the Middle East are ever more clearly serving the interests of "partners" which don't quite line up with its own interests anymore. The way things are going, a smaller US footprint could be the outcome even as the scourge of ISIS is finally removed. If that's not impetus for a fundamental rethink and reset of US policy, what is?

Obama finally acknowledges Russia as a great power - and what it stands for

Meeting with Italian premier Matteo Renzi at the White House yesterday, president Obama grudgingly indirectly acknowledged the futility of confronting Russia, calling it a "large country" with "major military capabilities" that should be "part of the solution and not the problem" to the world's gravest geopolitical and security crises which since 2014 have dramatically put it at odds with the West.

Revealing a stark realism that's very difficult for US interventionists - whether liberal or conservative - to swallow, the outgoing 44th president has also framed the kind of discussion pertaining to Russia that not only will be one likely focus of tonight's final 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but effectively stated the proper overarching American attitude and approach to Putin's Kremlin regardless of who replaces him on January 20.

This in itself is something of a victory for Moscow: the kind of simple concession of reality that the world's other nuclear superpower has been aggressively trying to extract from what has often come off as a delusional, self-aggrandized West hopelessly puffed up with its own sense of moral superiority and strategic supremacy. As such, a glimmer of light is finally appearing at the end of a tunnel that's been growing darker and darker in recent weeks, as US-Russia relations have nosedived to their worst level arguably since the most dangerous junctures of the Cold War.

Obama has decisively called out - yet again - those in American policy circles who are driven by a dangerous combination of simultaneously overstating Russian malicious intent towards the West while understating Russian determination and capability to thwart Western efforts to blackmail it into more compliant behavior. That doesn't in itself open a door to new cooperation with Moscow, but it shuts the doors to escalating brinkmanship that will cost the US and its Western allies far more dearly than they've let on.

The fundamentally divergent Russian worldview - that non-Western societies simply can't pull off transitions to Western-style or even Western-oriented liberal democracies - is becoming harder and harder to dismiss out of hand. When it really comes down to it, the most pro-Western elements and factions of strife-torn Islamic nations invariably always appear to be the weakest on the ground: if they have so much popular support and effective governing ability, why is it that they appear incapable of beating either the reactionary forces of the old regime or the arch-reactionary forces of unleashed jihadist fundamentalism - let alone both - even with massive injections of financial and material assistance from their deep-pocketed Western sponsors? Could it be possible instead that their mouths are just much bigger than their muscles?

The US and the West more generally are finding out the hard way that no revolutionary or democratic movement incapable of securing the levers of hard coercive state power - i.e. of violently eliminating their adversaries on the battlefield - can ultimately claim to be a legitimate popular representative movement, either. Certainly if the American colonists had folded on the fields of Bunker Hill or Saratoga, or if the Parisian insurrectionists had cowed before the musket fire of the Bastille garrison, nobody would ever remember or celebrate the glorious triumphs of US democracy or French republicanism. Democrats must whip tyrants in the business of killing before they can whip them in the business of ruling.

And that's what Putin's Russia - and more passively its ally, Xi Jinping's China - really stands for. Even democracy is ultimately all about governance. And governance is always ultimately about one thing and one thing only: monopolization of violence. To govern effectively is first and foremost to wield the sword with greater reach and scope than anyone else - and only then is there even the realistic prospect that the exercise of power can be more equitably redistributed between all factions and interest groups.

By putting the civic aspects of democracy - elections, courts, media, and other civil institutions - ahead of the absolute unchallenged authority to punish any and all rebels against the newly created order with consistent coercive impact across the board, the US and Western project of liberalizing the Middle East has blown up in smoke. Even the pending recapture of Mosul from ISIS will not fundamentally remove the structural political crisis in Iraq that call to question its long-term viability (as with Syria) as a unitary state.

That doesn't mean the Russian project in Syria will be any more successful...it just acknowledges that at least the Russians see the folly of putting the cart before the horse.

Axis of Fatima doubles down with Turkey as clueless West marginalizes itself

Having effectively called the Russian leader a war criminal for his actions in Syria, French president Francois Hollande has unsurprsingly been spurned by Vladimir Putin as the latter canceled an important trip to Paris that would have included crisis talks on both Syria and Ukraine.

Russian propaganda has already seized on French opposition criticism of Hollande's high moral grandstanding: just who does this clown think he is to accuse the one person who has confronted ISIS aggressively enough to finally overturn its secret support by so-called Western allies in the Middle East?

Less than a year ago, it was none other than Hollande who practically begged the Kremlin to help him retaliate against ISIS after a terrorist attack in Paris killed around 130 people. In response, Russia not only bombed the terrorist state's illicit oil trade so heavily that it was ultimately reduced to a trickle, but in the process humiliated Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan so thoroughly for secretly aiding and abetting ISIS and other jihadist groups in Syria that the latter tried to corral NATO into an armed conflict with Moscow, shooting down a Russian warplane which momentarily strayed across the Turkish border from Syria in the hope that Russia would retaliate (and letting a local sponsored militia then kill one of the bailed-out pilots on the ground).

As a sign of Putin's unique gift as a geopolitical power player, the Kremlin has now turned the tables around completely: it's now Erdogan who has come around to Russia's way of thinking in Syria, even as feckless Western powers like France and Britain - who are all but exposing themselves as little more than lapdogs for an enraged and befuddled Washington - hit new heights of diplomatic stupidity and realpolitik deficiency with their blanket segregation of "humanitarian" concerns from the hard realities of proxy warfare to overthrow an unwanted dictator.

Now that Putin and Erdogan have sealed their rapprochement with the reinstatement of the much anticipated "Turk Stream" pipeline project, further collusion between Moscow and Ankara to stabilize the Syrian crisis is likely. For Putin, this turn is worth incalculably more than having his name rehabilitated with a puffed-up self-important pathetic joke of a US surrogate whose ego hopelessly outstrips his achievements.

Events since the breakdown of last month's US-Russia ceasefire agreement in Syria have probably convinced Turkey by now that the Americans have finally abandoned the original goal of regime change against Assad, and that even a likely Hillary Clinton victory next month is unlikely to change that. No amount of Washingtonian rhetoric can alter the sobering calculus that US military operations against the Syrian regime would be an effective declaration of war against not only Damascus, but Moscow and Tehran as well - a prospective adventure the Iranians have derided as "suicidal" for American interests in the region.

Having been convinced by Russia and Iran that US threats at this point amount to little more than hot air, Turkey has most likely reduced or cut off supplies and arms traversing its territory to jihadists and rebels fighting the Assad regime across its Syrian frontier; this would appear to be largely behind the Syrian government's gains in and around Aleppo since the renewal of hostilities in the final week of September, and also why a jihadist counteroffensive in Hama province which appeared so threatening around the same time late last month has been largely reversed.

Ankara now has little leverage against the Kremlin and the ayatollahs should the Axis of Fatima reignite the Kurdish issue in Syria's northern frontier region to punish it for still refusing to give up a proxy war to overthrow Assad. But Putin and Khamenei know what his bottom lines are and appear willing to concede them. That's quite a contrast with his phony friends in the West who are still pestering him over "human rights" for the traitors who tried to kill him in the July putsch, or who are still effectively blackmailing his government over its prospective EU membership contingent on proper handling of Syrian refugees.

It's clear that Mr. Erdogan wants an effective veto over both Kurdish and Iranian influence in both Syria and Iraq as ISIS is finally whittled back in the vast contiguous desert spanning the hinterland of the two countries. Putin's Turkish diplomacy has doubtless focused on these core interests of Ankara, and the revival of the pipeline deal indicates how masterfully he has satisfied his fellow strongman's prerogatives.

In Syria, Turkey clearly wants to extend its "Euphrates Shield" operation to push further southwards from the border buffer zone it has already established when it evicted ISIS about six weeks ago, before further Kurdish consolidation of the area. Ideally, Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) units will play a key role in the coming assault to liberate Raqqa - being fellow Sunni Arabs, they're most suitable to long-term occupation of this jihadist stronghold sector - but at present they're still too thin and weak in the area compared to the Kurdish YPG (peshmerga) militia-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which remains better positioned and heavily favored by its Pentagon sponsors to lead the campaign for the caliphate capital. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a tug-of-war might be raging between Erdogan's security-intelligence apparatus and its CIA counterparts as to if and how best to redeploy the FSA: the spooks at Langley probably don't want too many of them pulled out of anti-Assad front lines in western Syria too quickly to beef up Turkish-led operations against ISIS to the north and east, because that would betray a Turkish capitulation to Russia which would deeply embarrass the US.

Russia's sensible strategy with regards to the Turkish presence in Syria should be focused on delaying for as long as possible any powerful SDF operation on Raqqa: the longer this is put off, the more likely it becomes that Turkish proxies of the FSA and other "moderate" Syrian opposition get reshuffled from the fight against Assad to an alternate anti-ISIS front much deeper inland, to eventually play a large if not the leading role in Raqqa's liberation before a US-led Kurdish operation seizes the initiative from Moscow and Ankara. Neither Putin nor Erdogan should be particularly concerned about this latter possibility, in any case: because it would entail virtual ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen by Kurds, ISIS can be expected to put up a good fight; or if not, the Turks can reopen covert arms and supply channels to the caliphate to hold off the SDF (a move that would irk the US but smirk Russia).

Of course, the longer term problem of what happens to those parts of eastern Syria liberated from ISIS will remain: Will the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen get their own federation just as the Kurds have created theirs? Will they still be represented by Damascus internationally? For Moscow and Ankara, these are probably secondary concerns: the main consideration both now and in future is the simple matter of who will be responsible for the security of these distant locales not controllable from Damascus. If Russia throws its weight behind a long-term or even permanent Turkish peacekeeping presence in areas that the Turks clear of ISIS - under UN auspices, of course - the door could open to much-needed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni peacekeeping participation in the Syrian interior, as well. That sure won't go down well with Assad, but still won't be a particularly high price to pay for political survival and prospective international rehabilitation (at least with much of the non-Western world).

Recent developments in Iraq could already be a harbinger of what's coming in Syria in terms of cooperative Russo-Turkish conflict management. Last week, a row erupted between Turkey and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq over the former's extended deployment of a contingent of troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has clearly signaled that it wants Sunnis - be they Arabs, Kurds, or Turkmen - to take part in the liberation of the ISIS Iraqi capital of Mosul, which is being led by the heavily Shiite Iraqi government army. While Baghdad is understandably furious, its response is hampered by its double dependence on the US (for air power) and Iran (for local militia muscle on the ground), each with its own distinct interest in keeping Mosul mostly Sunni: the US, obviously, for the purposes of checking Iranian influence in northern Iraq; the Iranians to secure their primary strategic goal of an unbroken corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, which is only attainable with Kurdish collusion and some grudging Turkish acceptance that Moscow is probably being asked to mediate.

Amidst all this strategic jockeying in the region by its major players, Western marginalization in Syria is becoming increasingly evident - and so is its potential negative spillover to the US and Western position in Iraq and the broader region more generally. If it were but more open to Russia's underlying viewpoint that Assad has a vital role to play in Syria's eventual stabilization, Washington would have enjoyed much greater flexibility to bargain away its regime change program for a much faster resolution of the ISIS problem. Russia and Iran would have gladly acquiesced - and incomparably more happily than Assad - to Turkish and Gulf Sunni security dominance of the sparsely populated heart of the combined territory of Iraq and Syria, provided it was exchanged for a guarantee of their vital interest of access to the Mediterranean. Instead, the Obama administration has allowed the most uncompromising Wahhabist-Salafist extremists of the Gulf Sunni establishment to effectively dictate a policy of eliminating Assad at any cost, with cool strategic rationale eviscerated by the flame of sectarian passion. In straining for a gnat, America has swallowed the proverbial camel, leaving the door wide open to the fate of the Mideast being dictated by the Axis of Fatima.

In just one week, Russia strongarms the West

In what has been a banner week for the new Cold War or Cold War lite, Russia has wasted not a single day showing the West and the US in particular just how costly will be any policy of confrontation against it or even the slightest hint that they still entertain fantasies of regime change in the Kremlin.

With the announcement that its aerial campaign in Syria is now open-ended, on top of a new deployment of the advanced S-300V anti-missile system to its naval base there, Russia has moved to decisively secure its long-term interests in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean with a permanent physical security presence.

At virtually the same time, Moscow has ramped up the threat of a new nuclear arms race by withdrawing from an important plutonium disposal accord from the early 2000s that would have seen it and Washington each destroy weapons-grade material for 8,500 new nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, a weeklong drill for thermonuclear warfare involving much of the Russian military and reportedly up to 40 million civilians has also been taking place, and yesterday it was reported that short-range Iskander-M nuclear-capable missiles were deployed to the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, from where they can threaten the new NATO deployments in the Baltic republics and Poland with instant annihilation.

And so, Vladimir Putin - who celebrated his 64th birthday yesterday - has sent quite a strong message to lame-duck Barack Obama: This will be your great legacy - a dramatically deteriorated security posture for both the US and NATO in the face of a resurgent Russian military - unless you finally use what little time you have left to rebuild our broken relationship.

With no plausible response in the realm of hard power geopolitics, Washington is reduced to clawing for abstract moral victories. Secretary of State John Kerry has floated pushing for a UN war crimes investigation against Russia and the Syrian regime over their recent actions around the besieged Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo; and yesterday for the first time, Washington formally acknowledged that it was in fact the Russian government which was behind the hacking of the Democratic party's servers over the summer.

American and more general Western weakness in the face of Russian assertiveness has become striking. Not only have NATO and the US-led coalition in the Middle East been militarily pigeonholed from free strategic action to salvage Western dominance, but it's increasingly obvious that this apparent shift in the balance of power has deep economic underpinnings.

Russia has proved utterly impossible to isolate or seal off as a means of forcing it - through impoverishment - to behave more in line with Western preferences and prejudices. Because Russian trade with North America is negligible, the success of sanctions against it always depended on the EU, but now it's quite obvious that the EU actually needs Russia as much as vice versa and probably more.

Russia has emerged one of the relative winners of the withering oil price war since 2014. The current level of $40 to $50 a barrel is not far from what it needs to stabilize the economy and budget, and its production has continued to set new records in defiance of OPEC and US shale. Anything significantly below this, and it's actually the large Western European banks - notably Germany's flagship Deutsche Bank, the poster child of the West's latest financial volatility - that stand to fail before any significant Russian entity.

The burgeoning strategic alliance with China, which sees Russia as one of the key elements of its new "Silk and Road" Eurasian economic initiative, gives Moscow a potentially pivotal role in the ongoing shift of economic power from West to East. And not least because Moscow has prudently cultivated good relations with every other key Eurasian player as well - Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and so on. Its pragmatic and winning attitude is clearly making headway even with US allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Overall, it's still too early to tell what if anything of consequence will ultimately come of the Sino-Russian partnership to reshape the economic and thus the geopolitical alignment of the Eurasian supercontinent, but despite the underwhelming progress to date, even this has already been enough to dispel the sheer doom and gloom that Western punditry and Russian liberals so dismissively assumed would be the fate of a revanchist-militarist Moscow with ambitions far exceeding its capacities; though admittedly, this is more indicative of just how deeply systemic and chronic a funk the West (especially Europe) has itself fallen into.

That being said, the West still doesn't realize this - its elites are not much less likely than the sport-hooligan masses to be distracted by the latest exploits or sexploits of the Kardashians - and in all likelihood won't realize it except in fits and starts for a while yet. Of all the factors that help Putin's quest to make Russia great again, this is probably the biggest one: with such an egregious combination of complacency, apathy, negligence, and puerile preoccupation with the petty vanities of social media-driven mass consumerist-voyeurism, the "free world" is literally begging to cede its leadership - both moral and physical - of the international community to more serious stakeholders.

Rejecting US military intervention in Syria will be Obama's greatest achievement

Yesterday, president Obama was supposed to listen to a laundry list of suggestions from his top military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials outlining potential next steps for American involvement in the Syrian conflict and the anti-terrorist operation against ISIS in that country. At least one initial report, however, indicates that this did not take place as planned.

It's easy to see why Obama's not particularly keen about more such advice from his "experts" on the Syrian problem - exemplified by a Wall Street journal editorial yesterday by Senator John McCain exhorting the US to adopt a new strategy of essentially coercing the Assad regime to behave better (read: stop trying to win your war because otherwise we'll bomb you into stopping), even if it risks war with Russia.

The fact that such puerile prescriptions as McCain's remain such standard fare in Beltway group-think is exactly why Obama is likely to continue to quietly downgrade the US role in the war to oust Assad, whatever his administration's public pronouncements of resolve to stay the course in its twilight three-and-a-half-month stretch.

Of course, the Russians themselves prudently didn't take any chances: beefing up their airspace defenses in Syria with a new deployment of the advanced S-300V anti-missile system. Between this and Moscow's earlier deployed S-400s in the country, they have now effectively imposed their own "no-fly zone" of sorts - not just for American warplanes, but even for America's vaunted cruise missiles - blanketing an area well in excess of the geographic domain of possible US coalition operations against Damascus.

It is in the face of this formidable array of sophisticated great-power deterrence capability that crusty old Cold Warriors like McCain fervently want to send American flyboys into the most dangerous game of brinkmanship against a near-peer military adversary since the Yom Kippur War or possibly even the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's as if he and much of the vested defense-intelligence establishment and its legislative lobby actually sincerely believes that Russia's little more than "a gas station posing as a superpower", as if the Kremlin doesn't retain thousands of nuclear warheads and their requisite delivery systems, some of which it can even deploy to Syria if the Yanks get particularly rowdy.

The palpable desperation of the neoconservative old-timers in Washington speaks to the unmistakable final rout of their archaic conception of America's vital interest in the Middle East: to these militarists who got us into Iraq in a grandiose project to remake the Arab-Islamic world in our own image, avoiding the worst in Syria has become so intolerable that it sure feels like the worst is actually unfolding anyway.

If nothing else he can remain proud of years hence when it comes to Syria, it's a safe bet Obama will still be deeply assured of the plain common sense of his repeated choice of spurning these increasingly absurd neocon fantasies that ultimately rest on an incredibly selective interpretation of the results of US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. On this at least, Obama has exercised the equanimity of judgment and overarching global perspective and foresight befitting a Reagan (whose own foreign policy record the neocons have also blatantly cherry-picked for self-serving ends); as well as guiding the clearest path of least resistance forward for his successor, be that Trump or Hillary.

America won't protect Syrian civilians because it can't admit defeat

Defeat is never easy, but acknowledging it is often even harder.

Such is the situation confronting the Obama administration in the twilight of its eight-year era at the helm of the free world. Few could have thought not too long ago that Syria's ruthless hereditary dictator, the erstwhile London ophthalmologist Bashar al-Assad, would not only still be in power in Damascus as Obama was leaving, but that his position in the nearly six-year-long civil war would be steadily improving.

Despite all the media complaints today that America's not doing enough to protect Syrian civilians or punish the Syrian regime, the fact is that Washington has waged a proxy war against Damascus since at least 2012, and in this effort it has manifestly been defeated. One can even argue that while the US hasn't done nearly enough to topple the Assad government, it's actually done more than enough to give it a pretext to slaughter its opposition as treacherous pawns of a Western imperialist plot.

The latest slaughter in the besieged rebel stronghold of Aleppo fits this pattern: the ferocious Russian and Syrian regime air assault on the city was triggered by an accidental US coalition airstrike against Syrian troops in the eastern stronghold of Deir ez-Zor on September 17; from the very moment this happened, the already fragile ceasefire brokered by Washington and Moscow a week earlier was doomed.

It hardly mattered that coalition forces didn't intend to attack Assad's men, or that this was obviously a lapse of Russian intelligence and coordination with the Syrian military; all that counted to Damascus (and even Moscow) was that this was a strike carried out by an illegal foreign contingent which had no invitation to bomb anyone on sovereign Syrian territory. It was the perfect propaganda coup for Russian and Syrian state media: just the kind of story they could spin ad nauseam to their traditionally cynical and conspiracy theory-prone public.

The Americans had to pay for this intolerable transgression, and so of course, Washington's despised rebel proxies and their civilian support communities had to be blasted to ribbons. Just to drive home the message of how displeased they were, on September 19 the Syrian regime seems to have deliberately misled a UN convoy manned by rebel sympathizers into thinking they were allowed to deliver aid supplies into the insurgent enclave of eastern Aleppo, only to then attack it in a signature "double-tap" airstrike which made a point of drawing out first responders to the initial raid so they'd be sitting ducks for follow-ups. That same day, Damascus declared the ceasefire dead, but in fact its warplanes had already commenced a savage new wave of "barrel bomb" attacks against civilians in Aleppo a day earlier in apparent retaliation for the Deir ez-Zor incident. Rather, the official end of the ceasefire gave the green light to the Russians to rejoin the hostilities as well: by the end of the week they were terrorizing previously well-protected Aleppo noncombatants huddled in underground shelters with their massive "bunker buster" munitions designed to take out hardened military installations.

As images of children being pulled from piles of rubble in Aleppo flashed across the globe, there's little doubt that these brazen escalations were undertaken by Assad and Putin with a specific intent to show the international community that no man, woman, or child anywhere in Aleppo was still either off limits or unreachable to the brutality of the renewed violence; in fact they probably wanted to elicit just the shock and horror that American and Western governments and media exhibited, so as to more deeply impress on them - before the whole world - their impotence and fecklessness (while of course conveniently continuing to insist that they're only targeting militants and terrorists).

For Putin and his Russian nationalist base especially, this was the sweet revenge they'd craved ever since the humiliating nineties, when they watched helplessly as NATO encroached on their frontiers and bombed to submission their strategic ally and cultural kindred Serbia over its savage conduct in the sectarian warfare of the former Yugoslavia: "We can kill whoever we please whenever we please - especially anyone you Americans are dumb enough to presume to shield from our power."

So there really was little to surprise about this whole descent into deeper and darker cruelty in Syria; since all war is cruelty anyway, the Kremlin decided that it was time to teach those juvenile Americans a lesson as to what they really signed up for - and what they're still barely halfheartedly engaged in in their now unfathomably idiotic quest to dislodge Assad.

Hope has long since become the de facto American strategy in Syria: a hope that Assad is too weak and his regime too thinly stretched and exhausted to plausibly win a war of attrition that could still drag on for years; a hope that Moscow would be too fearful of some Afghanistan-style quagmire in an Islamic country to shun a quick diplomatic resolution; a hope that the Shiite fundamentalist regime of Iran would somehow value its quick reinstatement into the global economy via the nuclear deal more highly than its costly gambit to save its sectarian ally on the Mediterranean.

But hope is obviously not a war strategy - not even a proxy war strategy. Wars are about violence and threats of violence escalation. America has lost its proxy war with Russia in Syria, and its Sunni regional allies have concomitantly lost their proxy war with the Shiite axis led by Iran, for the simple fact that this war wasn't fought as an existential struggle that must be won even at any price - or at least a higher price than the other side is willing to pay.

The West is thus reduced to diplomatic grandstanding about "moral values" and the supposed imperative to protect civilians, as if it has never itself targeted hostile civilians in wars of total victory it felt it had to win.

In fact, if only Washington would actually give up the lost cause of its proxy war, it could readily reduce the suffering of the Syrian people whose welfare it purports to prioritize. It could easily set up "safe zones" in the far north below the Turkish border - ideally in the buffer zone that the Turks have now set up with their "Euphrates shield" incursion spearheaded by moderate rebels - that neither Assad nor the Russians are likely to have any particular interest in threatening for quite some time. Into such a tacit "no-fly" sanctuary sector can stream many of the remaining 250,000 residents of rebel-held Aleppo who are now being bombed and starved out; whilst the remaining thousands of insurgent and jihadist fighters have already been offered safe passage to another front of their own choice, in line with now well-established Syrian government precedent.

But clearly the US still won't concede defeat in its proxy war, which relinquishing the Aleppo pocket would essentially be. If Russia and the Syrian regime can't be punished for having the gall to try to win what was supposed to be an unwinnable conflict, at least they must pay dearly for actually winning it. More Syrian civilian collateral damage be damned.

Maybe with Hillary in power come January 20, the US will actually resolve to win for a change, rather than merely stave off the creeping and agonizing appearance of defeat. If you can't admit to being beaten, it becomes very tempting to try to change your fortunes; whether that can actually translate into a plausible game plan is another matter entirely.

A year later, why the Russian intervention in Syria could just be beginning

On the anniversary of Russia's entry into the Syrian civil war, and little more than half a year since Moscow announced the end of its initial mission, it appears increasingly likely that this whole operation in the shattered country is actually just beginning.

With additional Russian warplanes heading back to Syria, it probably won't be long before the previous peak of Russian aerial bombardment over the course of the last year is reached or even exceeded.

The key difference now is that the political process to end the war is all but dead in the wake of the collapse of ceasefire talks with the US, leaving the Kremlin with no choice but military re-escalation. Contrary to the popular Western narrative, Vladimir Putin intervened in Syria out of perceived vital interest, not some vain desire to reassert Russian power or make up for the supposed Russian quagmire in Ukraine. And it is out of this same vital interest - preventing the fall of the Syrian regime to an insurgency increasingly dominated by radical jihadists - that he will now double down for a longer fight.

The West has never understood or appreciated the Russian view that even if a so-called "moderate opposition" takes center stage in a new Syrian government after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, it will very likely be muscled out within months by extremists with whom it was joined in a marriage of convenience so long as both still had a common foe in Damascus. Moscow entered the conflict with few illusions about what had to be done: these "moderates" had to be brought to heel first, so as to be forced into a choice between reconciliation with the regime and a continued devil's bargain with their jihadist bedfellows.

If there's any miscalculation Putin has made, it has been to underestimate the extent to which the whole Syrian crisis had long since become a strategic red line for Saudi Arabia in its deteriorating proxy war with Iran. To the former, any settlement short of Assad's removal was and still is considered a major blow to the millennial Sunni Arab supremacy over Shi'ism in the heart of the Islamic world. As such, Riyadh has taken great care to steer the exiled Syrian opposition in the direction of a blatantly sectarian goal of Sunni Arab majoritarianism in a post-Assad government, with few if any explicit concessions to minority rights in one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse pieces of real estate in the region.

Had the Syrian peace process been driven primarily by feuding Syrians, it would have been a rather simple affair for Russia to mediate: in exchange for the regime's granting of full amnesty for rebels and dissidents and some limited posts in government (including more federalized local administrations) for their leaders, the insurgency would turn its guns away from Damascus and towards Al Nusra Front and especially ISIS.

But the Saudis would have none of this. Knowing full well that those rebel groups with the most leverage over Damascus and Moscow were the very ones it supported most fervently in an uncompromising stance against Assad, Riyadh corralled the Syrian nationalists into its maximalist straitjacket, such that by the time the opposition entered the Geneva peace process last winter, it was effectively little more than a front for the Gulf kingdom's regional agenda.

Clearly the Saudis wanted to keep the pressure on Assad at a very high level and retain a sense of escalation capacity; their new crown prince, the hotheaded young Muhammad bin Salman, was keen on acquiring the credentials of a tough military leader capable of duking it out with Iran (especially in Yemen) increasingly independently of the US. He seems to have pushed his father, the more circumspect King Salman himself, into an overall more hawkish stance vis-à-vis the Russo-Iranian axis than would have been advisable; his confidence, however, was apparently founded on an outdated perception of the depth of American involvement in the region generally and the resolve of the Obama administration to enforce the Iran nuclear deal specifically.

It has finally gradually emerged over the course of 2016 - in the wake of the final cutoff of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in January - just how much of US-Saudi policy since mid-2015 has been predicated on a false assessment of leverage over Tehran with regards to sanctions over the Islamic republic's nuclear weapons program. When the nuclear deal was secured with Russian brokership at the UN in July 2015 - at virtually the same time that Iran was coordinating with Moscow's planned foray into Syria - it was widely thought in Washington that Tehran's desire for renewed access to international markets and investment would outweigh its interest in Assad's survival in Syria (a point on which even Ayatollah Khamenei was expected to be flexible if it came to it).

This has turned out to be the central blunder of the Obama administration - one that it seems to have tried to hide or downplay with its own media and its Mideast allies alike, but which has become increasingly hard to do so.

As Saudi-Iranian relations nosedived over the execution of Saudi Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr around new year's, an enraged Tehran saw fit to test the limits of US resolve to ward off the creeping Russo-Iranian usurpation of the longstanding American-Saudi "power couple" status in the region. The campaign to prop up Assad noticeably intensified and scored key successes against the rebels in the following weeks, culminating in the first US-Russian ceasefire agreement of late February; in the meantime the Iranians brazenly stepped up their provocations against US naval personnel and vessels in the Gulf, kidnapping a group of American sailors who were then released in negotiations that involved a secret reimbursement of $400 million of previously frozen Iranian funds.

Since then, through two failed Syrian ceasefires, the Russo-Iranian position has gradually but undeniably further improved at the expense of the American-Saudi one, both in the Levant and more broadly across western Eurasia as a whole. The tectonic paradigm shift is not military or political but socioeconomic: as Europe grapples with the double whammy of a creaky financial system and an unassimilable mass of Muslim refugees fueling a nativist-populist backlash, a resilient Russia's expanding commercial ties with upstart giants China and India make it far less isolated than Western sanctions purport to make it; Moscow has matched Saudi-led OPEC tit-for-tat in the production and market-share battle, notably stealing critical Chinese business from Riyadh since 2014. Iran, too, is increasingly in cahoots with Delhi and Beijing as well as Moscow: the great Eurasian powers are collectively becoming so self-sufficient in their economic and geopolitical heft that it's actually the stagnant and confused West which is beginning to look isolated.

This has enormous implications for Saudi Arabia and its junior Gulf Sunni monarchies: their principal livelihood having been decimated by none other than their great ally and protector (the shale-fracking revolution in the US), whose public has turned increasingly hostile (the US Congress' overriding of Obama's veto of JASTA against the Saudi government), they could soon feel hung out to dry by Washington so badly that they'll have to reconsider the entire basis of their foreign and security policy.

All this means that the Russian operation in Syria, now ramping up once more after a brief halt in March, has far more potential sustainability than the West and especially the US assumes to be the case. The combination of Russian and Iranian austerity and zeal in the face of American fecklessness, halfheartedness, and confusion on top of Saudi exposure and vulnerability in a chronically cheap-oil environment marked by dramatically elevated Western Islamophobia - to say nothing of the badly frayed US-Turkish relationship in the wake of the failed July putsch against president Recep Tayyip Erdogan - points to an irreversible decline of the regional power structure which has enthroned Washington atop the Middle East for four decades. Perhaps the bigger question already is how badly these developments will harm US influence further afield, in both Europe and further eastern Asia.

Russia for its part (and Putin specifically) has little cause for sudden dramatic escalation of any considerable magnitude; its airpower and other support of the Syrian regime's war effort (to include a ground presence of advisers and limited deployment of combat personnel) has the wherewithal to be incrementally upgraded and augmented in such a way that the political and diplomatic aspects of an intensifying "great game" between regional and global powers - founded ultimately upon socioeconomic factors across vast lands and habitats - will predetermine and undergird the actual military strokes and strikes (and counterstrokes and counterstrikes).

In that regard, it's probably little wonder that Obama and Kerry have been reduced to the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off when it comes to the Syrian problem: having long ago been dealt bad cards in the poker match, at long last their bluffs are being called by their opposing numbers who are ever more confident of holding the winning hands.

As Syrian revolution finally dies, fate of Islam is what matters now

The Syrian army has launched a ground offensive to retake Aleppo, in what could be a major turning point in the civil war. Pro-regime media outlets have already trumpeted the retaking of a key district in the central "old town" sector of the city, though the sustainability of this gain will only be confirmed in the coming day or two. Although the regime and its Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies are eager to occupy rebel territory, it also suits the Axis of Fatima to draw the Sunni insurgents out into the open in bold counterattacks that expose them to withering air power.

The longer this continues, the more Moscow corners Washington into caving into its demands for a combined front against the terrorist groups ISIS and Al Nusra Front as a precondition for any letup in the brutal attrition of rebel-held Aleppo's remaining civilian population.

With reports leaking out that the deep-pocketed Gulf Sunni monarchies may arm the rebels with advanced anti-aircraft weapons, now is definitely the time to press home the advantage of virtually unchallenged air power.

In fact, the Syrian air force's higher rate of jet losses since spring already indicates the presence of effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles throughout rebel-held territory, so it's questionable just how much more of a difference the stepped-up aid being proposed will make. The regime's aerial warfare tactics have doubtless constantly shifted and adjusted in the face of the growing SAM threat.

A bigger stretch is whether anything at all can be done to significantly dent Russian air dominance: not only do the Russian jets include advanced models like the Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35, but even their older Su-24s and Su-25s doubtless employ more sophisticated countermeasures against anti-aircraft threats. It's also likely that should push come to shove, the Kremlin will unleash its long-range heavy bombers like the Tupolev Tu-22M3 to drop larger numbers of massive "bunker busters" (possibly from Iranian airbases again) that have wreaked such havoc on underground civilian shelters and subterranean rebel installations in Aleppo in recent days; these high-flying supersonic beasts need something more substantial than man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to seriously target.

Only a massive jihadist counteroffensive can now save Aleppo from falling back into Assad's clutches and thereby effectively reducing the Syrian opposition to a predominantly rural insurgency with a glaring preponderance of radical Islamists. Absent such a dramatic turn of events yet again, in a month or so pro-regime forces will have neutralized Aleppo without necessarily occupying most of the rebel eastern sector - they simply need to constrict all potential pathways leading in and out of those areas (for both people and supplies) so tightly that it won't be plausible anymore for the rebel-jihadist alliance to ever recover from the encirclement.

At that point, Damascus and Moscow will have a powerful bargaining chip: they can demand that any remaining "moderate" opposition join a proposed national unity government if they still desire to salvage anything at all from their long and ultimately failed struggle for Western-style democracy. The only alternative would be to be ground down slowly and painfully over a further period of months as a pocket once containing close to half a million inhabitants is drained down to potentially less than 100,000 (from 250,000-300,000 currently) - while being surrounded by increasingly diehard resistance that can only be characterized by deepening radical Islamicization, anyway.

But in fact, even the best-case scenario of a new rebel-jihadist breach of the reimposed siege probably wouldn't be much more auspicious for whatever's left of the original Syrian spring. Such a victory will be the product of such a brutal pitched battle that it can only further solidify the jihadist extremist element of the resistance as the heart and soul of the whole cause. In that case, Messrs. Assad and Putin might even cynically allow the ruins of eastern Aleppo to become the premier magnet for Sunni terrorist and militant groups in the whole region, so as to dig in for the binary struggle between secular dictatorship and reactionary theocracy that they've always claimed the West must make; it would help Ayatollah Khamenei, as well, for Aleppo to serve the same purpose for Iran's new "Shia liberation army" drafted from the entire region that a bombed-out Beirut played for Lebanese Hezbollah (and its Iranian sponsors) three decades ago.

For the Axis of Fatima, crushing the Sunni extremists and terrorists would be really nice; but swaying the rest of the world that they're on the frontlines of blocking a global descent into medieval barbarism would be even better. The future looks sunny either way: between themselves and their most ferocious enemies, they have all but strangled the Syrian revolution stillborn and, with it, snuffed out the dying breath of the vaunted Arab spring. That great political wind which seemed to blow so hopefully in the liberal West's direction has at last settled on a new course of a colossal struggle for the fate of Islam in the third millennium.

Obama's real mistake in Syria: not renouncing regime change

The unfolding humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe in the Syrian city of Aleppo has given Barack Obama the occasion to reflect publicly on his fateful choice not to more deeply involve America in the destructive five-and-a-half-year civil war that has killed up to half a million people, displaced over 10 million others (internally and externally), and even spread its destabilizing effects to another continent (Europe).

But Obama seems to have been so consumed by the question of what would have happened had he intervened with direct military action in Syria that he's overlooked the bigger question: having renounced military coercion against the Syrian regime, why didn't he simply renounce regime change altogether?

The fact of the matter is, the Syrian conflict has dragged on only because Washington, even now, still supports the rebellion to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Through its Gulf Arab and Turkish allies, the US has funded and armed the insurgents who otherwise would have run out of money and materiel a long time ago. The whole covert war waged by the CIA alone has consumed billions of dollars since 2011 - an effort akin to the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Quite a pity that it's all gone to an ultimately losing effort.

It's not that Obama wasn't aware that it would very likely be a losing effort. He had held his fire in 2013 partly because he already knew that if he threatened Assad, the Iranians would immediately pull out of the then still largely secret nuclear deal deliberations, and partly because even then he was fearful of how Putin might react. In hindsight, that was the moment when he should have dropped the whole policy of regime change altogether: if the US wasn't going to lead the operation itself, it could only hope that its own regional allies would be able to out-escalate Assad's allies, but Obama was already aware of Moscow's and Tehran's bottom lines, so it's somewhat baffling why he still retained a diplomatic stance that depended on them not doing the utmost (in the end) to shore up their client state in Damascus.

Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, and Obama saw other factors at the time which were more favorable to staying the course of backing the revolution's primary goal. Neither Russia nor even Iran, he thought, wanted an indefinite quagmire in Syria, and he was convinced that US support for the rebels could sustain just such a stalemate. This belief persisted even after ISIS blew the whole region up in mid-2014 and created a new urgency to get the Syrian conflict over and done with.

It turns out, though, that Obama just never gave himself that bit of extra wiggle room that a more prudent or attentive realpolitik power broker would have: instead of conceding political and diplomatic ground to lock in military gains, the US-backed rebellion in 2014 and 2015 only became more uncompromising in its demand that Assad leave immediately to face a dishonorable exile at best or a war crimes tribunal at worst. This not only made it more likely that Assad would unleash even more havoc on the opposition and suck in even more brazen Iranian and Russian support, but it also closed off the best chance for a political settlement favorable to Washington, its regional allies, and the democratic West: a removal of Assad himself without the destruction of his regime.

With Assad's back against the wall in the spring of 2015, it would have been prudent to work with Putin to secure a political transition that would end with the Baathist paramount leadership's abdication under the condition of immunity from forced exile or prosecution for war crimes. The aim would have been to perform a "brain transplant" of the regime so that its mind could be altered while leaving its body intact, thereby allowing collaboration between loyalist and opposition elements to kickstart the creation of a more democratic order under a new constitution. Much further bloodshed could have been averted if the Obama administration pressed its utmost leverage on the opposition to enter into this process without regard for Assad's or his inner circle's personal fate; absent such a change of heart and strategy by the opposition, it can only have become an increasingly desperate all-or-nothing contest for the survival of the entire Syrian state, not merely Mr. Assad, and this ensured a descent into deeper and more savage violence - to ultimately pull in the Russians on top of the Iranians in support of the regime.

Instead, as we approach the anniversary of the Russian intervention in Syria, Obama and his top policymakers are smarting from having been effectively cornered into renouncing regime change because the rebels can only realistically bargain for much less - probably little more than their mere political survival at this point. Had they seized their position of strength in early 2015 to settle for something less than they aspired to but well within their hard military capability to secure, Assad would plausibly have become a mere private citizen surrounded by his heavily armed Alawite clan and perhaps a broader Alawite enclave on the Mediterranean coast under special UN protection, wondering whether his dubious future prospects in the country make it better for him to just emigrate to Iran or Russia.

The outgoing US president will have much to think about in the coming years, but eventually he'll recognize that on Syria, in the first place, he should have paid much closer attention to the crisis to be able to more proactively drive the opposition's negotiating strategy and tactics; then perhaps he would have had the "aha" moment he now concedes may have appeared to a Churchill or even an Eisenhower.

It's Hillary's judgment that's getting bombed to oblivion in Syria

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Hillary Clinton was caught on video nearly fainting as she hurried to leave the 9/11 Memorial two weekends ago; not only was it the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, it was also the fourth anniversary of her darkest moment as Secretary of State - the storming of the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

It's Hillary's whole foreign policy of "regime change" to eliminate secular dictators in the Middle East - which she aggressively pushed at the State Department in 2011 and 2012 - that's now being bombed to oblivion by the air forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his superpower patron, Vladimir Putin, in the besieged ruins of Aleppo, the Syrian city that's become the focal point of that country's five-and-a-half-year civil war.

Hillary undertook her stance against Mideast autocrats - indeed, autocrats everywhere - for declared humanitarian reasons, and for this alone she shouldn't be judged; what should always have been carefully assessed, however, is her own judgment as to how best to effect the kind of change and liberalization which her own political values and principles prioritized. You can have the highest ideals and loftiest plans to reach them in the whole world and then some, but in the end you'll be evaluated on how capably you actually executed your policies to deliver the intended results.

In this light, the further Syria polarizes between Assad's brutal regime on the one hand and the equally brutal Islamic extremists of the Al Qaeda and ISIS variety on the other, the more complete a failure Hillary's tenure as America's top diplomat is exposed to be; at the very least, it casts a dark pall over the entire basis of her campaign, which is that her experience alone qualifies her for the top job, as if experience alone equals prudence.

It gets considerably worse, of course, if you throw in her email scandal into the mix: just how much of her implicit support for Islamic extremists (so long as they were also for "regime change") was influenced by the millions poured into her "nonprofit" foundation by deep-pocketed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni clerics?

Whether she realizes it or not, Hillary's past decisions in the Middle East are now coming home to roost. The best she can hope for, in fact, is to gracefully completely flip-flop by renouncing her whole agenda of eliminating dictatorships she doesn't like without weighing the potential consequence of unleashing even worse regional and global instability.

Instead, you have to wonder if she'll be brain-dead enough - or so much in thrall to Saudi oil money and neocon bureaucrats at Langley and the Pentagon - that even now she'll propose we bomb Syria and risk a shooting war with nuclear superpower Russia.

Syria is the price America must pay for underestimating Russian power

Breaking what was quickly becoming a deafening silence on the whole issue in light of its recent dramatic turn for the worse, Obama openly admits that the Syrian civil war "haunts" him as he prepares to wrap up his eight-year presidency.

With no end to the five-and-a-half-year conflict in sight, even as fatalities approach up to half a million, such an acknowledgement from a leader known for reservation and lack of hyperbole underscores just what a disaster Syria has become for US foreign policy.

Obviously, Obama's immediate interest is to defend his own decision-making against the storm of criticism that's sure to intensify in his final months in office; this indicates that with Kerry's diplomacy having failed, he's essentially checking out of the Syrian crisis altogether.

Kerry's latest proposal that both Russia and Syria ground their warplanes in the wake of the ceasefire's collapse was nothing short of ludicrous desperation: his plea's spectacular failure has forced the poor Pentagon chiefs to yet again clarify to Congress that such a US-imposed no-fly zone amounts to a declaration of war against both Assad and Putin. A war that was already off the table against Syria alone back in 2013, and which has become sheer fantasy since Russia's intervention a year ago.

The Obama administration is now confronted with its most obvious shortcoming of the entire Syrian morass: namely, that while it's stopped pursuing regime change in Damascus, it simply can't renounce it either.

America's halfhearted commitment to this maximalist goal - removing Assad - was already plainly exposed by Obama's backtrack on the "red line" of chemical weapons use three years ago, which initially opened the door to Russia's upending of the US role in Syria. Thereafter, Washington fanned the flames of the Syrian insurgency with monetary and arms assistance via its Gulf and Turkish allies, in the ultimately accurate calculation that this would out-escalate the intensified Iranian and Hezbollah support for the Syrian regime. But everyone in Washington from Obama on down severely underestimated Putin's Russia: not only Moscow's resolve to retain its strategic outpost on the eastern Mediterranean, but even more so the raw power it would bring to bear (pun intended) to do so.

So Syria is the price America must pay to learn this lesson - except don't hold your breath that we'll actually learn it. Unless Trump first upsets Hillary and then effectively fires the entire defense-intelligence Beltway brass, we can only fall back to more halfhearted (even quarter-hearted) measures to try to achieve even more outlandish goals (i.e. booting Russia out of Ukraine); we will suffer ever more humiliating defeats that make Russia and Putin specifically look even bigger.

US now reduced to pretending it's not losing badly in Syria

As the Syrian ceasefire rapidly dissolves into little more than a diplomatic facade, a cornered Barack Obama has resorted to reminding the world that there simply isn't a plausible military solution to the Syrian conflict, as if merely pleading with the Russians, Iranians, and Syrian regime about how long and tough the fighting ahead will be can deter them now, despite having failed to do so in the past.

The problem is, this is the same Obama who confidently proclaimed a year ago that the Russians were stumbling into a quagmire like the US fiasco in Iraq by entering the already protracted Syrian civil war on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad. As it is, a year later the situation is anything but a quagmire from Moscow's perspective.

The Kremlin has achieved its primary goal: militarily stabilizing the core areas of the Assad regime in western Syria, including the capital of Damascus in the southwest, the major cities of Homs and Hama in the west-central region, and the entire Mediterranean coast to include the largest port, Latakia in the northwest, as well as the important Russian naval installation at Tartus further south. Between these key urban areas, their interconnecting supply routes and substantial surrounding control buffers, the pro-regime coalition has essentially secured nearly two-thirds of the remaining Syrian population.

Should the shattered commercial center of Aleppo in the far north fall as well, this will jump to about three-quarters; it is recognized by all parties to the conflict that an Assad victory in Aleppo - a distinct possibility in the coming weeks - will be a potentially lethal blow to the non-ISIS insurgency trying to force him to abdicate.

With a contiguous stretch of territory from Aleppo all the way down to Damascus, the regime will have locked down the lion's share of "useful Syria" - the best farmland, the traditional centers of industry and commerce, and most especially all access to the sea. Even though ISIS will still physically control much of Syria's oil and gas reserves in the desert hinterland, whilst the rebels will retain their enclave in northwestern Idlib province and part of neighboring Aleppo province, the extent of this military victory will be such that Assad will no longer be under pressure to enact a political transition that incorporates the Syrian opposition.

At that point, the combination of military and political advantage at the disposal of the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers will be formidable: the government-held sector will be wealthier and more populous than the rebel, Kurdish, and ISIS sectors put together. It will further be aided by the fact that each of these three rival statelets will be hostile to one another, perhaps even more so than any will be to Damascus; tensions between the Kurds and the non-ISIS rebels will prove especially useful for Assad to stoke to "divide and rule" the northwestern and north-central region near the Turkish frontier.

Realistically, unless the new goal of Assad's enemies becomes outright partition, the war will essentially be over - the Russia-Iran-Syrian regime alliance will have won, the US-Turkey-Saudi-Syrian opposition coalition will have lost. Fighting will continue, but the political contest which the whole war was all about will have been decided. ISIS meanwhile will have become practically a sideshow.

Indeed, this militarily driven political conclusion to the Syrian conflict may be much closer than Obama thinks or admits. If he's still betting on a diplomatic peace process, even he should realize by now that it will largely be on Assad's, Putin's, and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei's terms - in other words, practically impossible. But if there's anything his administration has demonstrated when it comes to foreign policy, it's that when all else fails, hope alone apparently becomes the fallback strategy.

So the US is now reduced to pretending that it's not losing - quite badly, to be honest - in Syria. And it will probably be all the worse precisely because its official hopeful statements are set to become ever more divorced from harsh realities on the ground.

It's all over: Syria just sent a fat F*CK YOU to America

The Syrian ceasefire isn't dead yet! So says the US and Russia - more accurately, so Washington is literally begging Moscow to agree with it that it hasn't just been punched in the face by the Syrian government with a big fat F*CK YOU written all over it...

The Syrian regime is now openly attacking US regional interests: having convinced its people that the US-led airstrike which killed nearly 100 of their brave soldiers over the weekend was a deliberate provocation - if not by the Obama administration, then at least by the CIA and/or Pentagon as part of covert Washington's long-running clandestine war for "regime change" - the Assad government is ruthlessly making it known that it wants to stick it to the hated Zionist entity before the entire international community.

What better way to do it than to destroy a UN aid convoy just as the UN General Assembly is convening its annual conclave in New York, with Syria and the refugee crisis the main topics?

Notwithstanding the standard denials from Damascus, it's absolutely obvious that the attack on the column of UN humanitarian assistance trucks near the besieged cauldron of Aleppo - and apparently a stationary support installation as well - was carefully premeditated to have the maximum destructive effect on the already defunct US-Russia ceasefire of September 12. This merciless multiple-wave bombardment of noncombatants, to pointedly include those who came to the rescue of those mauled by the first strike, has been a hallmark of the Syrian air force's most enraged outbursts for the past five years; it leaves no trace of doubt that this was a personal message Mr. Assad was sending to Obama and Kerry.

"WE'VE HAD IT with your refusal to renounce your FUTILE policy of regime change...we're now entitled to more of our own "accidents" against your imperialist interests and proxies on our own sovereign soil...F*CK YOU...YOU ZIONIST PIGS...COME AND GET US NOW! WE ARE READY TO MURDER YOU AND ANY OF YOUR FRIENDS!"

So how will Obama respond? More accurately, how will he try to shove his own head in the sand now as the Syrian fire reignites and burns out of control?

If at any time hope alone has been a foreign policy, that describes the American situation in Syria right now.

It's all over, folks...September 20, 2016 will be remembered as the day the US cop got its rear end kicked out of the hood that is the contemporary Middle East.

It's all downhill from here - in Syria, with Iran, in the China Seas, and last but not least in Ukraine and central and eastern Europe...

The Beltway defense-intelligence complex must have its revenge - somehow, somewhere - and very soon.

Because with Trump rising in the polls, the next regime change will be here in Washington.

Syrian ceasefire hangs by bare thread

Less than a week after it began, the Syrian ceasefire hangs by a bare thread.

Pro-regime airstrikes have resumed against rebel-held eastern Aleppo, a day after a US-led coalition raid apparently mistakenly killed scores of Syrian government troops. This against the backdrop of what the Russians claim to be preparations by the rebels for a new counterattack to break the government siege of Aleppo.

The US-led airstrike at remote eastern desert outpost Deir el-Zour on Saturday the 17th is highly problematic: even assuming that the target was thought to be an ISIS facility, it would have been an extremely rare (if not very first) instance of an American raid on the terror group in an area where its only opponent on the ground is the Syrian army. Just what in the world were American and coalition airmen effectively trying to help the Assad regime for?

As such, the incident will probably go down with the Syrian and Russian public as a deliberate provocation - a propaganda coup that Damascus and Moscow are both clearly pushing through their respective state media, so as to gain political cover to become even more inflexible regarding the nebulous sticking points of the ceasefire on their end, namely the delivery of humanitarian aid to east Aleppo. And today's resumption of airstrikes against the besieged rebel enclave is an indication that they're ready to take the kid gloves off.

Having already apologized for the botched raid, the US is now protesting that it in fact notified the Russians in advance about it; while this indicates a lack of coordination between the Russian command in Syria and the regime's local units which were hit, it's sure to give Moscow a pretext to demand that Washington restrict the Western coalition's air activity in the general area of Deir el-Zour (until such time as the joint operations center against ISIS and Al Nusra is established, if at all).

The Axis of Fatima - the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus nexus - was in a clear position of military strength when it acceded to the September 9 accord between John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov; Damascus at least may now have decided that it's time to repay the Deir el-Zour incident by reminding the rebels and their US and Saudi backers just how inferior their bargaining position is in the main Aleppo theater.

Since both sides have reportedly been breaking the truce here and there for days already, the Syrian regime can now resume "barrel bomb" attacks on eastern Aleppo while still appearing reasonably committed to a general "cessation of hostilities" - after all, no rational party can take so much provocation lying down, however otherwise it remains open to peaceful resolution. That makes it more likely that the rebels will respond in kind, and before long a new cycle of escalation will bring a nasty end to the ceasefire altogether. As of this moment, it will be a miracle if anything remains of the truce at all in another week's time.

Obama and Kerry can now plead all they want with Putin and Lavrov that one unfortunate incident doesn't tip the balance of onus for full implementation of the truce against the US; more realistically, events this past weekend will constrict Washington's freedom of action on the Syrian issue even more in relation to its desired end goal of a pro-Western democracy.

Syrian ceasefire may only delay a crushing US defeat by Russia

Despite a five-day lull in most of the fighting in Syria on account of the latest US-Russia ceasefire deal, a large-scale resumption of the conflict looks increasingly likely to break out as early as next week, notwithstanding the mutual interest of Washington and Moscow to continue with further incremental truces (i.e. 48-72 hours).

That's because the fundamental underlying disagreement looks increasingly impossible to resolve: the US simply won't impose costs on the so-called "moderate rebels" for not breaking cleanly with the former Al Nusra Front, and until it proves it will, there's absolutely no reason for Russia to ease the Assad regime's stranglehold on Aleppo by allowing humanitarian supplies to reach the besieged rebel eastern sector of the key city which is the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war.

Indeed, Moscow and Damascus now have every pretext to strengthen, not loosen, their encirclement of Aleppo: should they finally lose patience with American and Saudi foot-dragging over the "moderate rebel" impasse, they must be in a strong position to rapidly re-escalate their aerial bombardment of the civilian support infrastructure of eastern Aleppo in such a way that the 300,000 anti-government residents there can readily be forced into a "surrender-or-starve" choice.

This was, after all, the dire prospect that the entire anti-Assad insurgency and, even more to the point, its US and regional Sunni backers, found themselves facing when they desperately tried to secure a truce last week - and ultimately did so only at the price of agreeing to severe Russian and Syrian demands to completely cut off Al Nusra, which they're now clearly loathe to follow through on.

As a consequence, it now appears increasingly likely that all the ceasefire will end up doing is delaying the US-backed opposition's inevitable final rout from Aleppo by an additional two to four weeks. Putin and Assad can't sit on their thumbs forever. They know exactly what they're looking for, which with each passing day becomes more and more remote a prospect: that Al Nusra and its closest extremist affiliates will finally get booted out of the joint operational command center of the umbrella Islamist militant coalition called Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), which has dominated the anti-Assad insurgency in northern Syria since its formation in early 2015.

In other words, what should now be taking place is a full-scale purge of the most powerful rebel coalition's best commanders and intelligence operatives - because they're members of Al Nusra. But quite the contrary, it appears that other key Sunni fundamentalist factions which comprise the Army of Conquest (notably the proto-Taliban Ahrar al-Sham) have put their own feet down in support of Al Nusra - they have expressly refused to join the ceasefire at all. In doing so, they've made it practically impossible to meaningfully distinguish a "moderate" rebel group from an "extremist" one: not only are these jihadist bedfellows of Al Nusra effectively a clandestine liaison between the suicidal fanatics and the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA), but it's so obvious to just about anyone observing the conflict in northern Syria that even among the secular remnants of the original Arab spring and Syrian revolution, Al Nusra itself has gained tremendous popularity and legitimacy.

All this makes it quite clear that both "moderate" and "extremist" rebels still hope to maintain maximum ambiguity as to what distinction can be drawn between them on the battlefield - and by extension, that they still want to use the truce to strengthen themselves so as to become capable of breaking the regime's siege of Aleppo yet again.

When the US agreed to crack down on the insurgency's links to Al Nusra a week ago, it did so knowing that arm-twisting its proxies into compliance would be difficult to impossible - yet for Kerry and ultimately Obama, even this was far better than an unchecked Russo-Syrian onslaught that could well have obliterated much of the remainder of eastern Aleppo by now, unleashing another few tens of thousands of refugees.

Now, just a week later, and barely five days into the actual cessation of hostilities, the clock is already ticking down - fast. The US has reportedly threatened Russia that it will pull out of the agreement to jointly bomb Al Nusra (and ISIS for that matter) if humanitarian aid to Aleppo remains blocked as of early next week; this is obviously a media ploy to make it sound as though Moscow and Damascus are the parties blocking the path to resolving the Syrian conflict.

But in fact, it's obvious why the Russians are now making such hay about Washington deliberately withholding the actual terms of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement of September 9 from the rest of the world, not least the UN: disclosing these would unmistakably show that over the past week, it's actually been the US which has completely failed to keep its promise to extirpate from the Syrian opposition its CIA and Pentagon-brokered Al Nusra links.

And so here we are - Moscow and Washington once again reduced to making veiled (and soon not-so-veiled) threats or ultimatums against each other.

Except it's Putin's Kremlin whose guns are actually loaded to back up its diplomatic pressure, while Obama in the White House remains - as ever - essentially clueless as to the sheer futility of leaving policy implementation and details to his entrenched Beltway bureaucracy, which appears more set than ever on its course of suicidal stumbling into the claws of the Russian bear.

Will latest Syrian ceasefire work?

The US and Russia have struck a new truce after another round of marathon diplomacy between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Effective September 12, Assad will stop bombing rebel-held areas while Washington will join Moscow's air campaign against Al Nusra Front as well as ISIS.

For the US, a deal was very badly and urgently needed for the second time in little more than half a year, as its rebel proxies were again on the verge of complete defeat in and around the strategically crucial city of Aleppo, which over the course of 2016 has become the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year conflict. Though this latest cessation of hostilities arguably buys time once more for the stubborn insurgency against Assad to recover and gather strength for the next round of fighting, one can easily see why the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers could use a breather, as well.

Putin and Assad will seek to use the truce to lock down their renewed encirclement of rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which has just been reimposed in recent days after a month-long breach by Al Nusra and its allies.  Given how dangerously exhausting the back-and-forth fighting around the city has been in the last two months for his badly overextended army, Assad has good reason to bring his expenditures of blood and treasure down to a bare minimum, while securing as much political cover as possible for his hard-fought, then forfeited, and then finally recovered territorial gains. By finally joining forces with Russia against Al Nusra, the US has signaled that it has overruled rebel aspirations to militarily wrest the city from the regime, as such an effort has become utterly dependent on Al Nusra and its extremist affiliates.

Instead, the remaining secular and "moderate" Islamist opposition must now dissociate completely from the fanatical jihadists whose battlefield prowess has made them increasingly popular with their own constituents. This could be a major stumbling block to renewed peace negotiations at Geneva. However, it's one thing to admire Al Nusra diehards because they give pro-regime forces such hell; it's something else altogether to actually join them. Both Moscow and Washington must be hoping that their alliance against Al Nusra, even if hazy on the specifics, will at least force on all Sunni jihadists a choice of whether to throw in their lot with an implacable aspiring emirate (or even caliphate) or instead take a gamble on a political process that restricts their leverage against the Syrian regime.

It's precisely this loss of precious leverage - given how prominent Al Nusra has become to the whole anti-Assad insurgency - that was clearly the biggest objection raised by those elements in the Washington bureaucracy, that is to say the CIA and the residual neocon holdouts of the State and Defense Departments, against any deal with the Kremlin whatsoever. On the surface, the very fact that this agreement actually pulled through at all is an initial indication of their crushing defeat.

More realistically, though, since Kerry deliberated intensively and for hours on end with the agreement's US governmental stakeholders - read: the neocon bureaucrats - before giving Lavrov the final go-ahead, these sore losers grilled him mercilessly to try to tweak the implementation of the new truce yet again against the Russians. In fact this is definitely why it took so long: one can easily imagine the vicious back-and-forth wrangling between poor Kerry and CIA director John Brennan as well as Defense Secretary Ash Carter, both of whom essentially consider Putin, not ISIS, as the true existential threat to America.

In the end, Kerry would have had to lay down the law: "Look guys, this is our last chance...if we don't get this deal tonight, the Syrian revolution will be exterminated...how many times do I have to repeat that we are NOT going to escalate a proxy war against the Kremlin?? We don't even have the Turks to help us do that anymore! I cannot offer Mr. Lavrov anything that the Russians will soon find out to be our duplicity or trickery...we cut off Al Nusra NOW and FOREVER, and live with the consequences of that...because the only alternatives are far worse...that is final!"

So will the latest Syrian ceasefire work? The answer probably rests on one thing and perhaps only one thing: Will Obama finally be able to rein in his deep-state apparatus?

Or perhaps Syria will actually work out in his last months in office, but that embittered apparatus will instead strike in Ukraine. The last thing anyone can expect is for it to take a humiliating blow lying down...someone, somewhere, must pay for this gut-wrenching Syrian fiasco in blood.