I've explained how the Syrian deal will fall apart for all the reasons of bad-faith that all UN-related things fall apart, but now let's look at the forces in the world which will lead this to a brutal and bitter conclusion, namely a newly-empowered Russia and its third-world allies from the Soviet era.

John Schindler really spells it out brutally in describing the impact of Russia's seizure of the Syrian issue:

The international consequences of this are complex but detectable. For
the first time, Putin has successfully made Russia a plausible alternate
power center in the Middle East – and by implication, well beyond. By
backing his client to the wall in Syria, Moscow has shown that it can be
trusted, that its word is its bond. Unlike Washington, DC’s word, the
malleable nature of which has been demonstrated multiple times during
Obama’s presidency. If you get in bed with Moscow, Putin will take your
panicked phone call, at all hours, and not let you be arrested like
Mubarak, nor will it let you be manhandled into a sewer pipe to be shot
in the head like Gadhafi. This is a powerful, indeed indelible message
in much of the world.

 

Of course, Assad was already in bed with Moscow. But maybe the Egyptian military dictatorship isn't quite as much…or Qatar, with its influential media empire in Al Jazeera. They will be, after this.

Let me explain what this is really all about, at the end of the day — for Moscow, for the OIC, and for us — Russia's ability both to kill and eliminate the Islamist terrorists that the Saudis and Iranians support to keep the West off balance — AND convince the Arab/Persian world that it can take care of the weakened West and can be trusted to prevail.

Russia's
ability to cunningly invoke the idea that it is a) a Christian nation
of 1,025 years in age and b) a power willing to do WHATEVER it takes — unlike those soft liberal Westerners with their human rights concerns – to defeat Islamist
terrorists and fighters.

What do nominally Muslim tyrants fear more, radicals in their midst who challenge them on corruption and justice grounds, or whom they fund elsewhere to heckle others, or the West, who might topple them completely and let their enemies win?

This is an irresistable combination that has already
won over a large chunk of the American right wing — you can get Drudge
headlining "Vladimir Putin is head of the free world" because of this,
and you can get Lee Stranahan rushing off to cover the persecution of
Christians by Islamist rebels in Syria to explain why we shouldn't "arm
Al Qaeda".

That the situation is more complicated and fluid doesn't matter. The broad brush-strokes of the narrative are already there.

1.
When we went in Iraq, supposedly we were fighting a murderous tyrant
who was hiding WMDs and who was related to 9/11. I used to say that even
if the weapons of mass destruction might not be there, the mass graves
were there which meant that conventional means were used. But the
little-discussed reality is that those mass graves were filled with the
same forces who — no longer killed  by Saddam and his henchmen once we invaded, toppled him, and defanged the Iraqi army  — then fought us by
committing terrorist attacks on the civilian population.

Most of the
100,000 people killed in Iraq were killed by them, not our troops. We
are blamed for "giving them a theater". The Russians know cynically that
we should be blamed for not letting Saddam continue to kill "the
Chrisitian world's enemies". We once backed Saddam in his fight against
Iran, which is worse. Iran backed militants against us in Iraq. But the
bottom line, despite the complexities, is this: we had high moral ideals
about democracy and inclusiveness and Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds that
have have all come to naught because the Sunni terrorists,now that
we're gone, go on killing Shiites.

2. In Afghanistan, we fought
the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Al Qaeda ostensibly to create this
inclusive and democratic state with women's and girl's rights. It ended
in tears all the way around. The Taliban and its allies committed most
of the killings of civilians, despite the attention our victims
disproportionately got. Now we're leaving, the attacks will continue and
it will be a threat to Russia and other nearby countries who will use
more ruthless force on it. And just as Obama dropped the investigation
of Dostum's victims early in the war, in which US troops may have been
involved, so will we be more likely to look the other way as ruthless
methods get used to kill ruthless people like the Taliban. We're tired.

3.
In Libya, we backed "protection of civilians" which inevitably morphed
into backing the rebels as any removal of that essential tool of tyranny
— killing civilians — will do in any situation (which is why we
should talk about "freedom fighting" and not "responsibility to
protect"). The rebels, emboldened now that their wives and children
weren't getting killed in large numbers, and undeterred by the 100
civilians that NATO bombing did cause, about which the Russians will
never shut up, proceeded to hunt down and kill Qaddafi. Then we had
chaos, Al Qaeda killers running around who killed our diplomats — the
people that Qaddafi used to fill *his* mass graves up with, when he
didn't strategically fund them as suicide bombers to harass the West now
and then. We lose. Russia, concerned about its oil and gas business disrupted in Libya by our RTP venture, wins.

4. In Egypt, we backed the Arab Spring, the democrats
and even the Muslim Brotherhood in the belief that democracy would make
people less sectarian and ruthless and turn them into "inclusive"
politicians. We were wrong. We did nothing to stop their excesses, then
when the military returned to kill them, we didn't pull our aid, either.
We were left with everything in tatters, especially our reputation as
a force for anything good, anywhere. Meanwhile, the military quietly keeps hunting
down Islamists while we and the news media are busy with Syria.
Privately, we're relieved, and so are quite a few Egyptians, despite the
many innocents killed.

4. Now we have Syria, and we complain
as a good Christian country about the killing of civilians, and we
soothe ourselves with the thought of moderate rebels and pluralism and
inclusiveness of the sort that the Obama bots don't even have about
Hillary supporters. But we lost this proposition when we let Putin take over the Syria account completely and put in a place a machine for ruthlessly eliminating the population that contains the rebels (like Mao's "draining the sea" concept) — all as we play "let's put the chemical weapons under kontrol".

So what does this all boil down to? Our
fighting these wars is about the belief that we can stop secular or
moderate Islamic tyrants who kill Islamists and Al Qaeda from killing
lots of civilians on the way to doing that, stop their authoritarian regimes that oppress everybody's human rights, and turn them into pluralistic and
inclusive states (Egypt or Libya). It doesn't work, terrorism prevails,
and then Vladimir Putin looks good.

Russians are never politically
correct. They say terrorists have to be hunted down in their outhouses
and slaughtered because they threaten the Christian state, and they
don't fool around. They slaughter them in large numbers, and if they rise up even harder and commit even more horrible acts (Nordost, Beslan, the Moscow subway, Domodedovo), they crack down even more ruthlessly and put their most ruthless proxy in charge (Kadyrov). Then they win.

We'd like to think we're better than that and
are more nuanced and can pick out "protection of civilians" and
"discouragement of radicals" all the way through and arrive and lovely human rights-respecting societies. I can't think of a place where
we've done that.

So, too many people are actually going to be
happy that Putin has come to our rescue to kill Islamists. After all,
Putin made sure how horrible we saw they can be, up close and personal, by letting nature take its course
with the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, in case we didn't get it with
Benghazi or Tahrir Square.

Long ago a colleague of mine who
visited Afghanistan during the Soviet war returned and said that it was a
war of communism and Islam, not a war really involving the West even if we are tangentially involved helping some of those opposing the mass crime against humanity that the Soviets were committing (so many people forget that they killed ONE MILLION OR MORE civilians in Afghanistan during their war). And
that's still the case, because "communism" was only that era's ideology
to shore up "Moscow the Third Rome," and now Orthodoxy has returned to
shore it up today.

That it isn't Christian to kill innocent
people, even if they are of a different religion, will not be a visible
message.

There will always be radicals like Jacob Appelbaum, Snowden's encryption
helper, to claim that in America's wars in Muslim countries, we are
"preventing freedom of assembly" or "free practice of religion" — when
we have never done that and it's Vladimir Putin and his allies in
Central Asia who have done that by putting thousands of devout Muslims in jail just for
diverging from state-controlled Islam.

Putin's propaganda machine has done a good job with the Muslim world making them think that "America's wars" in fact kill innocent Muslims. In fact, Putin has killed or enabled the killing of more Muslims that the US, and made common cause with old Soviet allies like Assad who have killed the most of all.  This sadly is successfully disguised in active measure after active measure.

If/when Putin succeeds in pacifying Syria, and making sure that Egypt has a Soviet-style Nasserite secular military that both keeps the population subdued and harasses Israel, then Putin will turn to Iran. Iran is being taken care of even this weekend with sales of anti-aircraft systems and an end to disputes about failure to deliver past systems. Iran has always been and will always remain an ally of Russia's because it is on its border, its peoples are intermingled with the vast Soviet empire which Russia still retains control over (1/3 of the population in Iran is Azeri, next to Azerbaijan, Russia's gas ally on the Caspian Sea which has newly prevailed in the fight against the West over pipelines). Iran.ru, an anti-Western and anti-Israel site, is funded by the Russian government.

When Putin pulls off the Sochi Olympics (with whatever brutal suppressions especially off-camera it will take), he will subdue the Saudi claim/implied threat that they will make trouble by funding Chechen or other North Caucasian terror. Even if a terrorist act still slips through, it will only reinforce the message: Islamic fundamentalists are what we all have to fear, but Putin makes sure that they don't ruin our fun — brutally, but successfully.

Indeed, it's a bleak time
but we must go on doing what we have always done, which is to keep
documenting how brutal methods used against civilians does not lead to
less terror, but produces more, but also at the same time, work at
creating social movements that condemn terror and don't excuse it, and
by showing solidarity with its victims. Not an easy task, and few will
pick it up.