Here we are then, with things happening too fast and close together to keep track, and the definite feeling that all most participants can do is tighten grip and hope to hold fast, as events gallop towards an abyss. Hezbollah picking a fight with Israel, and Iran holding their coat, and f**k all the UN or any other internationally based busybodies will ever be able to do. I was resoundingly chided by some of our international commenters last month for voicing my personal and inchoate feelings of dread… I am drinking some cheap Chablis this evening, and I do not feel any better than I did when I wrote this.“Events and portents appear, flashing like lightning in one of our summer Texas thunderstorms, finally occurring so frequently that the sky is continuously lit with an eerie blue-white light…”
See, here’s an analogy about co-incident and co-dependent states who have a certain history; it’s not a perfect analogy because there’s only a few features that the Independent Entity of The Gaza Strip has in common with Mexico; a lot of acrimonious and co-dependent history, and a lot of back-and-forth familiarity. Sort of like a lot of countries in Europe, come to think on it in my naïve American way.
Suppose, just suppose that — just by way of example, a group of Mexican narco-traffickers (who are a powerful influence in the borderlands, and perhaps not entirely de-linked from the official Mexican establishment, such as it is) decided to pop across the border— after months of lobbing a lot of indiscriminate and indifferently aimed rockets— say into Brownsville and Laredo, or El Paso and Yuma, where they had succeeded in doing nothing much except make local residents extremely nervous about loud noises, and extraordinarily prompt about hitting the deck— and snatched a couple of soldiers from Ft. Huachuca. Suppose they took them back over the border, and demanded that the federal government immediately free any Mexican nationals held by the various American law authorities. Imagine how that would go over?! And just to extend that simile— how would it go over, if Basque separatists in Spain did the same to soldiers of France? Or any other irredentist European community to a neighboring state… and consider that all any other such group would have do thereafter to extract concessions would be to go on a brief cross-border shopping trip for human capital.

No, d’huh. I do not have a good feeling about this.

The eastern world it tis explodin’,
violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,
you’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,
you don’t believe in war, what’s that gun you’re totin’,
and even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’,
but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”