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.
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