Russia: Who Needs The Olympics When We Have The ‘Great Game’

Russia stunned the world yesterday when it announced that it used an airbase in Iran to bomb Syrian rebels. The move is the latest signal of Russia’s increasingly assertive role in the Middle East, a region it had all but abandoned since the USSR was driven out of Afghanistan. Recently, even Turkey – a long standing US ally and NATO member – began moving closer to Russia, threatening to create a powerful “pro-Russia” bloc that would complicate US efforts to do its own meddling.

All of this sounds eerily familiar…

As ol’ Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In the 1800s, Russian and Western forces wrangled over the Middle East, and Central Asia was known as the “Great Game.” After two centuries of intrigue, the US eventually “won” the game and celebrated with an invasion of Iraq, because #Democracy. Now Russia, under Putin, feels like playing again, which sounds fun, unless you happen to live on the chessboard known as the Middle East.