I said a month ago that what I perceived to be Putin's plan for Syria would inevitably would go wrong.
In warfare things always go wrong at a certain point. It is not a proces you can completely control. The more complex, the less control and I think we can agree that the Syria situation is one in the range of highest complexity.
For a month now I couldn't understand why people were applauding Putin's action and criticizing Obama's inaction. For me the inevitability of failure was so obvious it was only a matter of time before it would show.
I think we reached this point now.
South of Aleppo the Iranians gained some ground but for the rest the offensive bogged down pretty quickly and was even reversed in some places. Substantial losses in manpower and vehicles.
-I just learned Russian planes killed 16 Hezbollah fighters today in a friendly fire incident.
If the Metrojet crash in Sinai is indeed the work of IS it would be an enormous drawback. It would force Putin to respond. Probably by committing more forces and that would drag Russia further in the quagmire that is Syria.
This dilemma is probably the reason why they are not jumping to conclusions to the cause of the crash. Maybe they will even deny it was an IS bomb.
I get the impression Obama understands very well Syria is something you don't want to get too involved in. And why would the US? What is there to gain? What is the US strategic interest in Syria? It's just about containing IS and, for now, there is no reason to involve western ground troops to achieve that.
Like Jeremy Shapiro from Brookings said last month in a VOX article:
"The Russian intervention is so incredibly stupid that it took the US by surprise that Putin would actually do it."
and:
"When your enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt him."
We'll just have to wait and see how this works out. Inaction is not necessarily always a bad thing.
