http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425234/print Marshal Putin and His ‘Anti-Hitler Coalition’
By Victor Davis Hanson — October 8, 2015
Contrary to the principles of American foreign policy of the last 70 years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly invited Russia to “help” monitor things in the Middle East. Now they are learning that there are lots of Middle East scenarios far worse than the relatively quiet Iraq that the Obama administration inherited in January 2009 — and soon abandoned.
Russian president Vladimir Putin liked the American invitation so much that he now has decided to move in permanently. Marshal Putin now wants the West to join his new Syria-Iran-Hezbollah-Iraq axis against the Islamic State — or to at least sit back and allow Russia to straighten out the Middle East as it sees fit.
To fight the Islamic State, Putin has called for something similar to the “anti-Hitler coalition” of World War II that saw the Soviet Union and the West unite to defeat Nazi Germany.
Certainly, the Islamic State, like Nazi Germany, is a savage regime. So far, it has grown unchecked at the very center of the Middle East. Yet under the cloak of fighting the Islamic State, Putin has two greater visions.
One, he is intervening to save his client in Syria, strongman Bashar al-Assad – and with him a new Middle East Shiite axis of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Russia. Putin says he wishes to destroy the terrorists of the Islamic State. But for now he is bombing moderate opponents of Assad and bolstering the anti-Western terrorists of Hezbollah and perhaps Hamas as well.
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