Heeding the Singularly Meretricious Advice of Putin

"We are supporting the government of Syria in the fight against a terrorist aggression, are offering and will continue to offer it necessary military-technical assistance."
"Without an active participation of the Syrian authorities and the military, it would be impossible to expel the terrorists from that country and the region as a whole and to protect the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Syrian people from destruction."
"People are fleeing Syria primarily to escape fighting that has been fuelled from the outside with supplies of weapons and hardware, they are fleeing to escape terrorist atrocities. Without Russia's support for Syria, the situation in the country would have been worse than in Libya, the flow of refugees would have been even bigger."
Russian President Vladimir Putin

How ingenuously self-serving, how morally bankrupt. This face-saving appeal to the international community to join self-righteous Moscow in defending the bastions of horrendously repressive statehood in a geography whose Shiite-led Alawate Baathist regime has already destroyed much of the infrastructure of the country, caused half of its population to flee ongoing government deadly onslaughts and been the cause of entry by international terrorists to further destabilize the geography can convince no one of Russia's humanitarian principles.

The Islamic State terrorists, and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad are cut from the same cloth; one Sunni the other Shiite, two warring parts of the same religion, each considering the other apostates and as such ripe for death. The Islamic State may have a slight edge on the creative butchery it inflicts on helpless civilians, but it is the government of Syria which has been mercilessly slaughtering its own civilians through every means available to them from chemical mass weapons to barrel bombs.

Vladimir Putin's ambition to elevate the Russian Federation to a reasonable facsimile of the Soviet Union in the scope of its hegemonic power led him to the kind of military adventurism that the West abhorred and never expected would once again surface. Russia's failing economy, suffering under the weight of international sanctions resulting from its invasion of eastern Ukraine, support for the ethnic Russian Ukrainian rebels and annexation of Crimea, along with the world glut on oil, leaves it vulnerable.

Hoping to restore amicable relations with the West and particularly with an obviously vacillating and thus hugely ineffective United States, he proffers the vision of the international community embracing Bashar al Assad and forging ahead in a unified effort to destroy the Islamic State jihadis and return Syria to the international fold of respectability. In the process his skill at unity-making would presumably invalidate the Ukraine-inspired sanctions, and place Russia in the role of a champion of peace and good governance.

Moscow has committed to a military buildup in Syria; just as surreptitious and with a similar purpose to that which took place on the border and across the border with Ukraine that has made Russia's Baltic neighbours so concerned about their own fate. In Syria, the long-time association between the two countries, and Russia's dependence on the Port of Tartus for its blue-water renaissance is critical to Russia's military and political future, twinning with Sevastopol.

Mr. Putin wouldn't be making his generous offer to the international community to join together in support of Syria's al-Assad in destroying Islamic State and the growing threat it represents if he wasn't assured that the U.S.-led air coalition striking Islamic State in Iraq and Syria simply hasn't worked. And so, Mr. Putin rides to the rescue, and altruistically invites NATO and the United States to join him, one big happy family, where all international transgressions of the rule of law are forgiven.

"We must continue a dialogue for the sake of reaching consensus. But ... we won't achieve anything until we defeat terrorism in Syria", stated President al-Assad, of the dire necessity to uproot "terrorism" and then when that has succeeded, discussions revolving around political reforms would be feasible. Just as feasibly reliable as claiming that it is not Syrian government actions that have created the tide of refugees flooding Europe, but rather Islamic State predation.

From the global community shuddering over the prospect of the Islamic Republic of Iran being in possession of nuclear weapons, to the vision of the Iranian Republican Guard, Hezbollah militias and Iran-supported Shiite death squads converging on the Islamic State along with the Syrian military, buttressed with Russian weaponry and Russian air and naval power ... the proffered alternative is just that, joined by NATO and the United States as well as the Arab League.

Quite a special club of integrated interests, that.