He's a Russian and Iranian ally, and their goal is to keep him in power. Our goals only overlap with ISIS. A similar situation has arisen with Turkey. Our most effective ally, the Kurds, are practically at war with Turkey. If we can't keep the Kurds and Turks off each other's backs, we certainly can't expect to be telling the Russians what to do, against their own interests, and threatening them with force when we were the first to intervene would be the height of hypocrisy. We have treaty obligations with Iraq and Afghanistan, so we have little choice but to help them with ISIS and the Taliban. We should disentangle ourselves from everywhere else.

If you take a map of the Middle East and draw red lines between all the countries who are enemies, and blue lines between all those who are allies, you can see we can't do anything there without pissing off several of our own friends. We really do need to get out of there.

The Russians can at least say they were invited.