watching the news last night had a certain cinematic quality; like the flashback that shows what they were watching just before the apocalypse. but i still think we might be getting a relatively slow but consistent rollout of ww3. the way europe is now embroiled is suddenly transformed; hollande says france is "at war" and is promising a hideous vengeance. well, that means throwing the french into the battlefield where already the russians, assad, iran, hezbollah, the kurds, turkey, the us, and the saudis are all active. i don't see the russian involvement as doing anything but escalating in the face of the plane. the knife attacks etc in israel should be connected up, and with more can pull israel into less covert involvement. egypt may well get into civil-war mode now, and since the plane bombing must themselves be planning an armed response to isis. i wonder how turkey is responding to the kurds taking sinjar, for a kurdish state is blooming along the border with turkey on one side and the islamic state on the other. this and the opposition to assad aligns the interests of turkey with the islamic state.
the islamic state really is a state now, with territory, borders, and so on. they have money, materiel, all sorts of resources, and i think can achieve spectacular terrorist attacks all over the world as well as defend themselves effectively. it's one thing to have a 'terrorist safe haven' in the caves of afghhanistan or rural somalia or mali or pakistan, quite another to have islamism as a belligerent nation in the middle of the middle east. i'm going to bet that they have intelligence services, an it department, document and munitions production, etc.
you are really going to see the rise of ultra-nationalist and anti-immigrant parties in europe now, and it could happen here too. you are going to see a rise in anti-immigrant or white suprematist etc violence. the relation of the french republic to its own muslim population just got even more dire and it's just as bad elsewhere. but these societies with millions of muslims could themselves get into low-level civil wars; the stance of france right now registers that. all of that might also give a goose to putin; if he had annexed eastern ukraine this morning no one would have noticed, and he can make common cause with parts of the electorate across europe, which is going to want a kick-the-terrorists' ass strongman. remember when i incinerated chechnya with thermobaric weapons?
there's no way of knowing where this is all going, but calming down any time soon is not one of the realistic scenarios. on the other hand, there are a good dozen scenarios where this thing just blazes from pakistan and xinjiang to libya to kiev to hungary to amsterdam with an ever-greater intensity. nor will we be sitting this one out.
