SU-34: Coming after Obunga's ISIS butt buddies....

Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates have a biting op-ed that shreds the president’s arguments for inaction in the face of Russia’s intervention in Syria. They note all of the wrongheaded reactions emanating from the White House for the Russian intervention:

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Sometimes the reaction is derision: This is a sign of weakness. Or smugness: He will regret the decision to intervene. Russia cannot possibly succeed. Or alarm: This will make an already bad situation worse. And, finally, resignation: Perhaps the Russians can be brought along to help stabilize the situation, and we could use help fighting the Islamic State.

“The fact is,” they note, “that Putin is playing a weak hand extraordinarily well because he knows exactly what he wants to do. He is not stabilizing the situation according to our definition of stability. He is defending Russia’s interests by keeping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power.”

Over at the Daily Beast, Michael Weiss points out that, wittingly or not, the Russian bombing is helping ISIS to advance on Aleppo by targeting the main obstacle in its path — American-backed rebel groups. Why would Russia help ISIS when its stated purpose in Syria is to hurt ISIS? Because the Moscow-

Damascus-Tehran strategy is to get rid of all the moderate rebel groups and reduce the conflict to a binary choice — Assad or ISIS — on the assumption that the world will then choose Assad. Once that happens, there will be plenty of time to deal with ISIS later.

If the White House has an effective riposte to these moves, it is a state secret. Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent, has a cutting dispatch today noting that President Obama’s policy of “strategic patience and persistence” in Syria is looking a lot like policy paralysis.

The latest sign of American failure: the decision, announced today, to end the Pentagon’s $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels which has produced only “4 or 5” active fighters. While presumably the CIA will maintain a covert program of its own, the Pentagon apparently is now to be limited to training a handful of rebel leaders in Turkey to call in American air strikes. This is a risky strategy that risks more collateral damage, and that effectively cedes the insurgent battlefield to more extreme groups such as ISIS and the al-Nusra Front

“The Chinese will be arriving in the coming weeks,” a Syrian army official told the Lebanon-based news website Al-Masdar Al-‘Arabi.

The report claims that a Chinese naval vessel is on its way to Syria with dozens of “military advisers” on board. They will reportedly be followed by troops.

The ship is said to have passed the Suez Canal in Egypt and be making its way through the Mediterranean Sea.

According to the website, the advisers will be joining Russian personnel in the Latakia region.

Meanwhile, an Israeli military news website, DEBKAfile, has cited military sources as saying that a Chinese aircraft carrier, the Liaoning-CV-16, has already been spotted at the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean coast. It was said to be accompanied by a guided missile cruiser.

The news comes after Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria agreed to establish a joint information center in Baghdad to coordinate their operations against Islamic State militants, according to sources.

“The main goal of the center will be gathering, processing and analyzing current information about the situation in the Middle East – primarily for fighting IS,” a military-diplomatic source told Russian news agencies on Saturday. .

On Oct. 7, Russian warships in the Caspian Sea fired 26 high-tech cruise missiles at rebel targets in Syria—a staggering 1,000 miles away.

The missiles in question, which the Pentagon calls SS-N-30s, were mostly unknown to the outside world before the Oct. 7 raid. Even close watchers of the Russian military were surprised to see them. The missile attack was also highly visible. In many ways, it was an announcement to the world, and America in particular, that the once-dilapidated Russian navy is back in action—and that Putin’s missileers are now among the planet’s most advanced.
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The media coverage was at least as important as the destruction of the alleged rebel facilities, U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “This is Russia demonstrating on a global stage that it has a lot of reach,” one official explained.

Eric Wertheim, an independent U.S. naval analyst and author of the definitive Combat Fleets of the World, a reference guide to warships and their weapons, agrees, saying of the missile volley: “I think it was a demonstration to the world.”

Wertheim and other foreign analysts were familiar with an earlier version of the SS-N-30 called the SS-N-27, but the latter is an anti-ship missile and the analysts assumed it could only fly 150 miles or so—a fraction of the roughly thousand miles the rockets traveled during the recent raid

The SS-N-30 obviously boasts a much greater range than its predecessors and can also strike targets on dry land. That makes it broadly similar to the American Tomahawk missile, which the U.S. military traditionally fires in large numbers from ships and submarines in order to wipe out enemy air defenses before conducting aerial bombing campaigns. The U.S. Navy fired Tomahawks to hit the most heavily defended ISIS targets at the beginning of the American-led air war over Syria in September 2014.

Very few countries posses Tomahawks or similar munitions—and only the United States and Great Britain have ever successfully used them in combat. Now Russia has joined that exclusive club of global military powers. And that should worry the Pentagon, Wertheim said: “It should be a wakeup call that we don’t have a monopoly on the capability.”

What’s particularly striking is that Moscow has been able to build this long-range naval strike capability with much smaller vessels than anyone thought possible. In the U.S. Navy, large destroyers, cruisers, and submarines carry Tomahawk cruise missiles—and those vessels are typically at least 500 feet long and displace as many as 9,000 tons of water.

The four brand-new warships that launched the SS-N-30s were much, much smaller—ranging in length from 200 to 330 feet and displacing no more than 1,500 tons of water. “Small ships, big firepower,” Wertheim commented.

That matters because, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s shipbuilding industry suffered a long period of deep decline that the Kremlin has lately struggled to reverse. That has had a profound effect on the Russian navy. “There are relatively few new warships in service at present and the ones that have been commissioned in recent years are all relatively small,” Dmitry Gorenburg, from Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, wrote in a recent analysis.

But the October barrage proves that even the small warships that Russia is building can strike hard and far—something that, once upon a time, only the United States and its closest allies could do. Moscow’s missile raid helps re-establish Russia as a global military power. “They’re very serious about this,” Wertheim said.

Turkey looks to be in trouble.

But the political instability caused by Turkey’s bad leaders has been greatly exacerbated by its bad neighbours, especially the continuing civil war in Syria and its deadly ramifications – an influx of jihadist fighters, a massive refugee crisis, and spiralling military interventions.

Since the end of the Cold War, global security has never been so seriously threatened as it is by today’s situation in Syria, which is now host to a head-to-head clash between the interests of Russia, the Assad regime and Iran on the one hand and the US, the EU, their Arab allies, and NATO on the other.

All sides claim to be fighting against the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists, but it’s clear that what’s really at stake is a lot more than just the fate of the jihadists or the political future of Syria. Already there’s an ominous spat underway over Russian planes' incursion into Turkish airspace; NATO has already raised the prospect of sending troops to Turkey as a defensive gesture.

And while it was always inevitable that the Syrian disaster would affect its northern neighbour to some degree, Turkey’s continuing internal political instability is proving something of an Achilles heel. By deliberately forcing their country into a period of chaotic and violent turmoil, Turkey’s leaders have made it more susceptible than ever to the Syrian conflict and the mighty geopolitical currents swirling around it.

And yet they press on with their cynical political ploys – seemingly unmoved by the cost to their people, and unaware that they could just be becoming pawns in a much bigger game.

Since the end of the Cold War, global security has never been so seriously threatened as it is by today’s situation in Syria, which is now host to a head-to-head clash between the interests of Russia, the Assad regime and Iran on the one hand and the US, the EU, their Arab allies, and NATO on the other.

All sides claim to be fighting against the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists, but it’s clear that what’s really at stake is a lot more than just the fate of the jihadists or the political future of Syria. Already there’s an ominous spat underway over Russian planes' incursion into Turkish airspace; NATO has already raised the prospect of sending troops to Turkey as a defensive gesture.

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President Obama is unwilling to risk escalating the conflict and does not have a new strategy to resolve it or defeat the Islamic State

NYT's
I am shocked! Shocked I tell ya........

This is a good thing.

Syria is a mess

— President Barack Obama said Russia’s nearly two-week-long military offensive in Syria comes from a position of weakness, after his administration was criticized for appearing to be caught flat-footed by Moscow’s mobilization.

In an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, Mr. Obama said Russia’s land, air and sea military campaign in Syria aimed at propping up Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime demonstrates that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Syria strategy has failed.

“Today, rather than being able to count on their support and maintain the base they had in Syria, which they’ve had for a long time, Mr. Putin now is devoting his own troops, his own military, just to barely hold together by a thread his sole ally,” Mr. Obama said, according to a CBS transcript of the interview to be aired Sunday night. “The fact that they had to do this is not an indication of strength, it’s an indication that their strategy did not work.