Putin Plays Middle East Chess As Obama Struggles To Figure Out Checkers

Get a load of this headline in the Detroit Free Press: Obama offers to work with Putin, Iran on Syria; Putin says work with Assad

Obama declared:

"The United States is willing to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran," Obama said. "But we must agree that after so much carnage there cannot be a return to the previous status quo.”

Any solution must not include continued support for "a tyrant" like Syrian President Bashar Assad, who Obama said has killed his own people in a war that began with a violent crackdown on peaceful protests.

Putin's response was a firm "Nyet" to Obama's words-without-deeds insistence that Assad must go.

In sharp contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin later called for a global response to fight Islamic extremism akin to a third World War and should be fought alongside Assad's government forces.

“We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to work with the Syrian government and its armed forces,” Putin told the U.N. “No one but the Syrian forces and Kurdish militia is seriously fighting against Islamic state.”

That sound you hear is generations worth of US dominance and influence in the Middle East being continuously piddled away by the current administration whether negligently or deliberately to create a Multi-polar world with diminished US capabilities and power to influence the course of events.

US doctrine used to have a stated goal of keeping the Russians OUT of the Middle East. Now the Russians have got the initiative and the US seems to be the one being diminished in stature and being shut out of the region.