Mick Hartley

Trump respects Putin as one of life's winners: a strong man, like himself, who knows how to get things done. He wants to work with the Russians to defeat ISIS and set the Middle East to rights. Putin has people killed? Well hey, we're no better. "What do you think, our country's so innocent?" 

Molly McKew – Trump’s Plan to Fight ISIS With Putin Isn’t Just Futile. It’s Dangerous:

On the surface, the idea of partnership with another powerful and capable military to share the burden of fighting the Islamic State may sound tempting. Russia has devoted considerable resources to broadcasting its "victorious war" in Syria, airing endless footage of spectacular airstrikes and trumpeting supposed territorial gains. The slick Kremlin media narrative and coordinated messaging campaigns have helped create powerful myths about its effectiveness in Syria and in the war against ISIS.

But that’s exactly what they are: myths. The truth is that it is both pointless and dangerous for America to fight ISIS alongside Russia. Pointless because the Russians are not there to fight ISIS — their real goals in the region have nothing to do with eliminating the terror group, but with empowering Assad and other anti-American allies. Dangerous because the United States and Russia share neither common goals nor common tactics. Our forces are not interoperable, and neither is the way we fight wars. Russians operate differently from Americans at every level of conflict — tactically, operationally, and strategically. There is no established trust between our nations or our forces, and the place to build that trust is not during a major operation where our goals are fundamentally misaligned.

There is simply no way to make Russia our partner in this fight without betraying the values we defend as a nation, betraying the principles we endeavor to uphold in this war, and betraying the force we have built to fight it….

It may not be fair that Russia is routinely bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure with relatively little backlash, while one stray US airstrike on a Doctors without Borders facility unleashes unending international outcry. But it’s a hypocrisy we live with as the world’s most powerful military, and it is the reason why American forces operate with the most restrictive rules of engagement on the planet — even though we know that in minimizing collateral damage, there is sometimes a cost in American lives. Because ultimately this is the best and only way to protect our fighting men and women, and our interests, when things go awry.

We still believe in international conventions governing war crimes — conventions the Russians explicitly reject — and we will expose our fighting men and women to criminal charges by fighting the way that Russians do. If we allow ourselves to integrate the Russian way of war, we implicitly endorse the Kremlin's actions, and the impact on our already damaged reputation will be incalculable. This endangers our troops, by shaping our next generation of warriors and commanders with this mindset of war, and this endangers our nation, by becoming everything we have spent generations training ourselves not to be….

Our operational objectives differ wildly. Ours are to eliminate a terrorist force; to limit its replication and recruitment; to keep it from attacking American soil; and then to get our forces out. The Kremlin's are to entrench a fractious ally (and other regional dictators and strongmen loyal to Putin), to project Russian force into the region, and to continue the realignment of global power away from the West….