Reuters has an article out today reporting the FSB’s claim that Kiev, London and Washington were behind the recent ISIS attack on a concert hall in Moscow.  Putin appears to be saying the same thing.  I suggest that they are merely trying to deflect attention away from the failure of the Russian security apparatus, particularly since there is talk of Washington having warned Moscow that something was in the wind.  Because the Kremlin has a fairly tight rein on information dissemination inside Russia, I believe that the Kremlin’s feeble efforts will be effective with a large percentage of the patriotic public that wants to believe in Putin’s Russia.  Regime fabrications will not, however, be convincing to the more sophisticated Russian citizen whose thinking will control the future of that country.  Those folks will primarily be focused on how well Putin can do in leading Russia to future glories.  Presumably they do not want to see him be defeated in Ukraine, whether they agree with the invasion or not.

I am extremely interested in intellectual dissidents inside Russia because I see them as critical to building a different relationship with that enormous country.  Putin shares my interest and that accounts for so many Russian political figures falling out of hospital windows to their death.  One of the reasons that I deplore Biden’s decision to let Russia invade Ukraine is that the resultant war forced a very large percentage of increasingly western-oriented Russians to flee the country.  Their motivation may well have been self-interest in avoiding the rigors of war, but they took with them their fledgling admiration of Western society.  I hold that Putin was glad to see them go and that explains why he made no real effort to stop the exodus.  Presumably, the ISIS attack on the Moscow concert hall killed and traumatized some percentage of this same group of people.  ISIS sees this group of humans as being their principal enemy - no matter their nationality.  Radical Islam is not at war with any nationality.  Radical Islam is at war with the fundamentals of Western culture.  Moscow’s concert hall and New York’s business center were both iconic targets for Radical Islam.  

I, of course, have absolutely no idea who the people are that are currently flooding into this country, but If I were one of our several foreign antagonists, I would be taking advantage of the situation.  Clearly, the ethnicity of our new immigrants includes groups of people from regions of the world that include regime’s hostile to our interests.  Were I currently in government, I would be looking at the potential for some sort of hostile action by three principal actors:  Radical islam, Communist China, and International Crime Syndicates.  Predicting who the attacker might be, predicting when the attack might occur, and predicting the security and political impact would be extremely difficult - except in the case of the crime syndicates which are, of course, already fully engaged - but the attack will clearly not be beneficial to you and me.  If I were influential, I would elect an intelligent person to lead us.  Because I do not see that level of intelligence anywhere on the political horizon, I am pessimistic, particularly since those fears are not the totality of the challenge facing us.  We also have to worry about one or the other idiot triggering a nuclear exchange,

The “good” news is that I don’t believe that the Chinese Communist Party intends to attack us militarily as long as they assess their overall strategy as being successful and Radical Islam can not presently do more than wound us.  That leaves Russia and societal decay as our principal threats at the moment.  Unfortunately, Putin is capable of triggering a nuclear exchange, Biden is letting Iran become a nuclear power, and Crime is clearly destroying society.  What is going to happen, if we are lucky, is that we will eventually wake up and start pushing back on the stupidity that is currently destroying us.  My guess is that the event that serves as our wake up call is going to be painful.