FOD 2015.09.28

Russian president Vladimir Putin and our own barack hussein obama are scheduled to meet this week. In advance of that meeting, barry is talking tough.

Pope Francis gave him a boost, Republican Speaker John Boehner is sobbing off into the sunset, and China’s Xi Jinping gave him paper promises on the environment and cybertheft. No wonder President Obama is feeling cocky.

No doubt fear stalks the Kremlin and Putin is quaking. Barack Obama is mad at him and letting the whole world know!

But Putin knows something else, too. Macho talk is the only weapon Obama is ready to use...

obama talks. Putin acts.

...Iran, Russia and Syria have set up three-way military coordination. Some reports suggest Shiite militia from Iraq may also be part of the effort to keep Assad in power.

When obama does act, he screws things up.

While some of that effort will fight Islamic State, the axis also will be fighting the same Syrian rebels the United States is supposedly supporting. We already spent tens of millions of dollars on them, with only a handful of trained soldiers and no advances to show for it.

Here's a little more detail about obama's effort to arm and train the Syrian rebels.

He (Putin) mocked U.S. plans to train up to 5,400 Syrian rebels to fight the group. "It turns out that only 60 of these fighters have been properly trained, and as few as four or five people actually carry weapons," he said.

As if that's not bad enough, the rebels are actually working for al-Qaeda.

U.S.-trained rebels in Syria handed over American-supplied vehicles and ammunition to an al-Qaeda linked group, the Pentagon said Friday in the latest blow to a program plagued by problems since its inception.

Way to go, barry. Is it any wonder that Putin neither fears nor respects obama?

Here's more insight regarding Russia's move into Syria.

Russia’s expanding military intervention in Syria has the potential to tilt the course of the war in favor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leaving U.S. policies aimed at securing his departure in tatters and setting the stage for a new phase in the four-year-old conflict.

Exactly what Russia intends with its rapidly growing deployment of troops, tanks and combat aircraft in the Assad family heartland on Syria’s northern coast is difficult to discern, according to military experts and U.S. officials, who say they were not consulted on the Russian moves and were caught off guard by the intervention.

Already, however, the Russian activity has thrown into disarray three years of U.S. policy planning on Syria, derailing calculations about how the conflict would play out that may never have come to fruition and now almost certainly won’t.

Another foreign policy victory for team obama. Many more of these and we'll be an international laughingstock.

Oh, wait...