Putin Is Right

What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria.

The Russians are flying transports bringing tanks and troops to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia to create a supply chain to provide a steady flow of weapons and munitions to the Syrian army.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, an ally of Russia, has lost half his country to ISIS and the Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaida.

Putin fears that if Assad falls, Russia’s toehold in Syria and the Mediterranean will be lost, ISIS and al-Qaida will be in Damascus, and Islamic terrorism will have achieved its greatest victory.

Is he wrong?

Yet it is in America’s interest not to have Assad fall — if his fall means the demoralization and collapse of his army, leaving no strong military force standing between ISIS and Damascus.

Indeed, if Assad falls now, the beneficiary is not going to be those pro-American rebels who have defected or been routed every time they have seen combat and who are now virtually extinct.

The victors will be ISIS and the Nusra Front, which control most of Syria between the Kurds in the northeast and the Assad regime in the southwest.

Syria could swiftly become a strategic base camp and sanctuary of the Islamic State from which to pursue the battle for Baghdad, plot strikes against America and launch terror attacks across the region and around the world.

Prediction: If Assad falls and ISIS rises in Damascus, a clamor will come — and not only from the Lindsey Grahams and John McCains — to send a U.S. army to invade and drive ISIS out, while the neocons go scrounging around to find a Syrian Ahmed Chalabi in northern Virginia.

Then this nation will be convulsed in a great war debate over whether to send that U.S. army to invade Syria and destroy ISIS.

And while our Middle Eastern and European allies sit on the sidelines and cheer on the American intervention, this country will face an anti-war movement the likes of which have not been seen since Col. Lindbergh spoke for America First.

In making ISIS, not Assad, public enemy No. 1, Putin has it right.

It is we Americans who are the mystery inside an enigma now.