It's time to start considering the timeline of the Syria debacle

Michael Goodwin at the New York Post raises a disturbing question: At what point did the Most Equal Comrade know that Russia's aim was to form a regional power axis with Iran, Iraq and what's left of the Assad regime in Syria and thereby elbow the post-America-led West out of the Middle East?

Consider:

For much of September, reports of Russia moving soldiers and military equipment into Syria invariably said the Pentagon was “puzzled” or the White House was “unclear” about Putin’s intent. Obama declared on Sept. 11 that whatever the dictator’s plan, it was “doomed to fail.”

The claims of fuzziness about Syria allowed Obama to keep the focus on his push to sell the Iran pact to Congress. He touted Russia’s support, vowed to impose “snapback” sanctions if Iran cheated and said he would work to stop the mullahs’ ­regional aggressions.

His arguments and arm-twisting kept 42 Senate Democrats in line, enough to save the deal. Yet soon ­after opponents lost their final vote, on Sept. 17, Russia revealed that it would lead a coalition of Iran and Iraq to intervene militarily to save the Assad regime.

The shock-and-awe attacks launched last week are rattling the world as Russian airstrikes pound Syrian rebels, including some we support, with Iraq and Iran providing boots on the ground. But it’s not possible that nobody in Washington saw this coming.

After all, the Russian plan took shape well before late September. The Iran deal was officially finalized on July 14, and Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani met with Putin in Russia on July 24. Fox News, which first reported the meeting, even had the flight numbers of Soleimani’s Iran Air flights between Moscow and Tehran.

Soleimani, banned from international travel because of links to terrorism, earlier had been spotted in Iraq, helping to defend Assad against Islamic State. Yet five days after Soleimani was in Moscow, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate the travel restrictions against Soleimani would never be lifted. Apparently, they would never be enforced, either.

Although Russia and Iran had separately supported Assad, Kerry never mentioned that they could be working together militarily. Yet the Institute for the Study of War, a respected think tank, reported that “available satellite imagery and open sources” showed that “the new buildup of Russian military forces in Syria began in July 2015 and accelerated considerably in late August and September.” That means the buildup began near the Soleimani visit to Putin.
The institute offered key details, including that in late August, a Russian ship unloaded armored personnel carriers. It cited another report from Syrian rebels that Russian-speaking soldiers were engaged in combat against Assad’s opponents.
Yet in early September, less than two weeks before the final Iran vote, Kerry still wondered whether the buildup reports were “accurate.” That ridiculous feint would soon morph to an acknowledgment of a buildup, but with convenient claims that nobody understood Putin’s intent.

Now, of course, everybody understands Putin’s intent and is alarmed because the war is widening and Russia has replaced the United States as the region’s top power broker, a blow to our national security and allies. 

Why would someone who was ostensibly the president of the United States of America (how fondly I remember that office and that country) allow things to come to this juncture?

If you're the Most Equal Comrade, it's the international component of the Great Leveling Project. Domestically, reduce a once-robust populace to a shuddering herd of cattle-masses, dazed and desperate and dependent on government "benevolence." On the world stage, reduce post-America to just another country among those that have come and gone in the passing parade that is world history, just a big land mass that has offered nothing particularly special to the human condition.

He is pure poison.