just to say the obvious, the nascent world war blossoms yet further today. turkey's shoot-down of the russian jet exposes a number of the fissures. meanwhile, putin is visiting iran. there can be no alliance against isis now that includes russia, and yet russia and iran are all over the field now, from damascus and beirut to baghdad. turkey may appeal to nato for a response to russia, as france to isis. as that happens, putin quietly increases the pressure on ukraine, which everyone is going to regard as the least of our problems right now unless it goes terribly wrong. that also engages all of nato.
meanwhile, as the kurds expand their territory along the syria/turkey border, the turks increase their attacks on the kurds. they will not permit the emergence of a kurdish state, which again aligns them with isis. we're backing the kurds, sort of, which would align us against turkey, or...with russia and assad? then we're allied with turkey to support anti-assad=anti-russia groups in northwest syria. that might sort of be why they shot down the russian plane. say the iraqi army, if there is one, takes the field. then i guess it'll be iranians sweeping in...with us advisors and air support, greeting the russians mid-desert i guess.
can you imagine the diplomatic/security chatter within nato, including turkey, and across to the russians today? the communications of heads of state and their staffs must be just furious. or imagine what things are like in the situation rooms in cairo, riyadh, london, tehran, brussels, berlin, tel aviv, kiev.
in saudi arabia right now, they're freaking out about the russia/iran/iraq/assad/hezbollah shia configuration. they're gearing up to fund every mode of sunni resistance, to make the cost of the russian incursion astronomical, which we might spell t-e-r-r-o-r. everything depends today on putin's restraint, which is never a good thing to depend on; if he responds belligerently toward turkey, or has various allied forces do so right now or disproportionately, all bets are off. meanwhile obama meets with hollande, then with putin, all of whom, along with the turks and saudis, have air forces operating in overlapping theaters where anything can go wrong at any moment, and they are all escalating their involvement.
the idea that you could shut brussels down day after day is not that surprising, but it demonstrates that a few people can bring europe to its knees, can shut down major cities. their own extreme hysterical security response will require the eu to attack isis in syria; anything else will soon make europe impossible. i hope i rarely make this assessment: things are even worse than they appear.
i do think obama has been sort of pathetic, extremely vacillating, talking belligerently one minute, the opposite the next, more worried about republicans than about isis or the russians. or what he's really worried about in a pitiful way is domestic politics, so his strategy is to make no mistakes by doing little while constantly portraying the rosiest possible scenario. but, on the other hand, i also do not see a constructive way for the us to be more fully engaged right now: all we could possibly do is add to the madness. so i have no advice and i even think basically that sitting on his hands, obama's best thing, is better than any envisionable alternative. the drumbeat for war coming from republicans and even dems is going to ratchet up though. one domestic terrorist attack...
