Putin has outmaneuvered Obama. Washington is trapped by its own political rhetoric.
At least that is how this news story will appear to the war hawks and hard-core partisans.

A week into Russia's military intervention in Syria, some top White House advisers and National Security Council staffers are trying to persuade President Barack Obama to scale back U.S. engagement there, to focus on lessening the violence and, for now, to give up on toppling the Syrian regime....
At the same time, Obama has ruled out engaging in a proxy war with Putin's military, leaving few good options. One path, however, would mean finding ways to tamp down the fighting by negotiating small, local ceasefires with the Assad regime.
“The White House somehow thinks we can de-escalate the conflict while keeping Assad in power,” one senior administration official told us.

That will certainly be how this development is spun, but in reality (as opposed to politics) this is an opportunity that Obama should seize.
For starters, President Obama's anti-ISIS plan has been an absolute disaster in every way possible. A good example of this is the other headline from this morning.

The Obama administration is abandoning its failed attempt to build and train a rebel force in Syria to take on Islamic State and will focus on equipping selected leaders and providing air support to their units.

Obama's plan of creating a moderate rebel army in Syria failed so spectacularily that it would be comical, if it wasn't so tragic.
What this article is saying is that we are going back to the pre-ISIS strategy of arming jihadists, a strategy that was already such a proven failure that it was the reason why Obama tried to create the new rebel army.

As I've written repeatedly over the past year, our anti-ISIS war strategy simply cannot work without some plan for Syria that doesn't include regime change, and now our strategy is in tatters. On top of that, our strategy in Iraq has only achieved a stalemate.

Simply put, we've reached a dead-end, with no real plan on how to end this quagmire that we've gotten ourselves into.

And then Putin intervened.

To understand why this can be a good thing for the United States, you have to step back and look at this from a non-American point of view.
Political partisans will only look at how this makes President Obama look bad, but what has really happened is that Putin had several very good reasons to act that had nothing to do with the United States.

For starters, Russia intervening in Syria wasn't Putin's idea. It was Iran's.

At a meeting in Moscow in July, a top Iranian general unfurled a map of Syria to explain to his Russian hosts how a series of defeats for President Bashar al-Assad could be turned into victory - with Russia's help.
Major General Qassem Soleimani's visit to Moscow was the first step in planning for a Russian military intervention that has reshaped the Syrian war and forged a new Iranian-Russian alliance in support of Assad.
As Russian warplanes bomb rebels from above, the arrival of Iranian special forces for ground operations underscores several months of planning between Assad's two most important allies, driven by panic at rapid insurgent gains.

Sure, rage against Putin if you want, but the architect of this whole move is Iran, Assad's biggest ally.
The reason why you haven't heard about this is because President Obama can't come out and denounce Iran while still pushing a treaty with Iran in Congress. Obama is trapped by his own policies.

Putin had two big reasons to support Iran's plan.

1) Russia has been an ally of Syria since the 1960's. Propping up brutal dictators during civil wars is simply international politics. (see the United States with El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980's)

2) Some of the best, toughest fighters in Syria, fighting for both ISIS and al-Qaeda, are former Chechens. Putin made the simple decision that he'd rather fight and kill them in Syria than on his doorstep. It's the same logic that Obama has used to justify our current war.

Putin made a calculated decision to join in the war, and embarrassing the United States was just the gravy.

With Russian planes in Syria, the idea of a no-fly zone is dead.
With a modest amount of Russian troops on the ground, the idea of an invasion of Syria is dead.
That kills any ideas for escalating the war, and us stuck with a war strategy that won't achieve victory.

To make matters worse, our Gulf nation allies are escalating the jihadist war in Syria.
Meanwhile in Iraq, there is simply no hope of peace without reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shias, and Washington has no leverage to make that happen.

So what do we do?
Our allies in this war are already showing us the door.

(Reuters) - Iraq may request Russian airstrikes against Islamic State on its soil soon and wants Moscow to have a bigger role than the United States in the war against the militant group, the head of parliament's defense and security committee said on Wednesday....
"We are seeking to see Russia have a bigger role in Iraq. ... Yes, definitely a bigger role than the Americans," Zamili said.

It isn't just Baghdad. The Kurds feel the same.
You already know how Iran and Assad feel about us being there.

For the first time since 1990, we have a chance to walk away from the disaster that is Iraq.
We can literally hand over the mess we created, and still blame someone else for not cleaning it up.
Opportunities like that only happen once in a lifetime. All Obama needs to do is walk through the door that so many of our mid-east allies want us to walk through.