Ukraine: Two (relatively) modern nations, Russia and the Ukraine, seem bound for collision and war. Shocking! And that’s my view from my comfy chair in Southwest Louisiana. Imagine for a moment if you were on the eastern border of Ukraine. I remember the pictures from Sarajevo during that war twenty years ago. the same Sarajevo that hosted the Winter Olympics, a pretty little European postcard town then, and what it looked like to see mortar and artillery damage to buildings, thinking to myself ‘How does one cope with having your home town become part of a battlefield?’

It’s happened in more places than that. Bosnians look like US. So do Russians and Ukrainians. The West hasn’t suffered warfare on its lands since 1945. How’s that going to work? I’m enough of a student of history to have seen the lines of Poles and French evacuating ahead of the blitzkreig in 1939 and 1940, and then in 1945, the reverse, as Germans fled from the Red hordes of the Soviet Army.

That’s history, though. Surely that was REALLY the War to End All Wars. Or not. Some among us like to think that we, the human race, have evolved past the point of seeing the need to proclaim those people over there as ‘others’ and then slaughtering them wholesale. Some among us are very wrong.

Mister Putin reminded us in direct words last week that Russia remains a nuclear power, but honestly, if he wants to bring Europe to its knees, he doesn’t have to turn Paris into a radioactive crater. Nope.

Forget not that in my present incarnation I’m in the natural gas biz. Europe uses HUGE amounts of natural gas, first, because it’s a darned handy fuel, and second, because it’s cleaner and easier to deal with than the other fuel they have, which is coal. Europe (right now) produces diddly squat amounts of its own natural gas. Greenies in France and Great Britain have essentially taking fracking off the table, so the easy gas is limited and getting smaller every day for those folks.

They buy their gas from… guess who? If you said ‘The Russians’, you get extra points for paying attention. The Russians sell the gas to the Europeans. Yep, the same Europeans who are ‘sanctioning’ Russia over its attentions to the Ukraine. Cute, huh? Gets better, too! Two-thirds of the gas that goes to Europe travels in pipelines through the – wait for it – UKRAINE!

You might imagine that European energy managers are about to crap themselves. You’d be right. Of course, Putin needs that European money, but to paraphrase an old saying, “Gas’ll get you through times of no money better than money’ll get you through times of no gas.” You think Europe is a hoot when temperatures in the summer break ninety, wait’ll you see Europe in the winter when there’s no natural gas.

And then we have the ISIS thing. Two years ago, when the media was all about “Arab Spring” I told you (as if you didn’t already know – I have smart readers) that ‘democracy’ in the Mid-East was what happened until one group was strong enough to put their own strong men in power to subjugate the rest.

I have also said that ‘negotiations’ with terrorists means that you talk with a spokesman who is only a ‘front’, that if one of their leaders starts to get ‘moderate’ then he will be replaced by radicals who stick with the original agenda.

They haven’t been subtle about the agenda. When it comes to telegraphing intent, statements from ISIS make Hitler’s Mein Kampf look positively Machiavellian.  In the 1930’s Hitler’s manifesto was public knowledge and the subject of public speech, and the rest of Europe listened and said, “That’s all just rhetoric.  They’ll never actually DO any of that.”  And in the 1930’s Hitler was pacing things quite nicely, right up until Kristallnacht.

Compared to ISIS, Hitler is a piker.  ISIS said what they’d do, and not only have they done it, but they’ve proudly advertised the acts.

I’ve got a ‘strategy’ for Obama:  Arm Israel. Not that they need it.  Our Jewish friends have some of the best, if not THE outright BEST weapons available, and a leadership with the resolve to USE them. That takes care of Israel, but in the rest of the Mid-East?  One thing about our Mozzie friends:  If they can’t kill helpless Christians and other non-Mozzies, they’ll happily slaughter each other in wholesale numbers.  Treat it like a dog fight.  Let the dogs go at each other, as long as they stay in their arena.

The worst thing about all this, the thing that hurts the most, is that we ARE a decent nation.  We honestly do NOT want to hurt the non-combatants, the ‘collateral damage’ of battle.  However, there comes a time when…  How many of the millions incinerated in Japan in 1945 were actually carrying Arisakas or piloting kamikazes?  How many of the people of Berlin and Dresden and Frankfurt were actually crewing Konigstigeren or Messerschmitts?

Comes a time when the actions of our enemies will require from us the stripping back of the veneer of civilization, making us take to the battlefields with ruthless aggression.

We’ve already seen the ‘honor’ displayed by our enemies in Gaza as they fire missiles from schools and mosques and hospitals, hoping that Israel’s righteous counter-attacks will create the death of the ‘innocents’ to feed the propaganda machine that is the modern media.

We will hate them for it, but they will turn us into something we don’t want to be.  And fathers will look upon their living, happy children and pray to God for forgiveness for the actions they took to keep their children happy and safe.