There’s much to admire in the article (up on the home page) that Marco Rubio has written on Putin, but not, sadly, this:
We must work with moderate elements of the [Syrian] opposition and step up training of rebels to fight not only ISIS but also Assad.
To the extent that there ever were effective“moderate elements” in the Syrian opposition, they are long gone, either annihilated, in flight or in exile.
So far as the latter two options are concerned Angela Merkel’s recent efforts will, as this story from Iraq suggests, only have made matters worse:
Some Iraqi soldiers are abandoning their posts and joining a wave of civilian migrants headed to Europe, raising new doubts about the cohesion of the country’s Western-backed security forces in the fight against Islamic State militants. Interviews with migrants and an analysis of social media activity show scores of fighters from the national army, police and special forces as well as Shi’ite militias and Kurdish peshmerga have left in recent months or plan to go soon.
They join more than 50,000 civilians who have left Iraq in the past three months, according to the United Nations, part of an even larger exodus from neighboring Syria and other conflict zones across the Middle East.
The inability of Iraq to retain its soldiers threatens to further erode morale in a military that has partially collapsed twice in the past year in the face of the Islamic State militant group. It could also undermine the efforts of a U.S.-led coalition that has spent billions of dollars training and equipping Iraqi forces to take on the militants….
A quick glance at the large number of young men in the crowds now pushing into Europe would indicate that the same thing is happening in Syria.
The only competent friendly fighting force anywhere near ISIS is Kurdish, and the Kurds will understandably put a higher priority on securing their (vulnerable) borders than in attacking ISIS on its own ground. The Kurds, I would add, are currently also under attack by our NATO ‘ally’ Turkey, a country that is playing a duplicitous game even by the standards of that part of the world.
Yes, the US and some European allies are waging war on ISIS from the air, but that’s a campaign that has failed, and will continue to fail, to ‘contain’ ISIS. And yet, for reasons that don’t need restating, there’s no willingness on the part of the West to commit boots on the ground against ISIS.
What’s more, containment is not enough. The longer that ISIS is given to establish itself as a state the more dangerous it will become to the region, and to the West. And it will be dangerous in a way that Putin, for all his machinations against the US, almost certainly is not.
Senator Rubio writes:
We need to make clear to Putin that we do not welcome Russia’s assistance in the fight against ISIS. Russian support for Assad’s slaughter of the Syrian people is only laying the groundwork for more decades of conflict and instability in an already fractured Syria. If Russia does not halt and reverse its military buildup in Syria, the U.S. should sanction the Russian defense companies and the individuals involved. Countries surrounding Syria that enable these actions by allowing Russian military overflights also need to know there will be a price for enabling Putin’s expansionism.
There might have been an argument for that a couple of years back, but now?
Assad is a butcher, and Putin is Putin. Neither can be trusted, both are hostile. Nevertheless, if the Russians acting alongside, presumably, what’s left of Assad’s military, are interested in destroying ISIS (that’s the first big if) and if they are prepared to do so (that’s the second), then yes, the US should welcome Putin’s “assistance” as the least bad option. That Putin is the least bad option is a terrible comment on American failure in the region, but the facts are what they are.
Contemplating the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill said this:
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
Sometimes there are no pretty options.