Politics: This may turn ugly

News of the date. Truck drove in the crowd in Stockholm. This, being our neighbor country, is the main headlines now here (some six hours after the fact). Nevermind that there is almost nothing but guesses and speculation going around, no real facts. So I'm not really interested, not yet. Tell me some facts, news men!

What is more real is that USofA just earlier spent several millions of dollars by bombing Syrian air base (news just speaks of cruise missiles without specifying the type, and I'm taking (probably way too low) estimation of some $500'000 each, times 50 or so). The company that provided these missiles must be lovin' it.

What happened just before this is that there was chemical weapons involved, with many civilians exposed, many seriously wounded or dead. Now, I have no idea whose chemical weapons those were but I find it to be unlikely that rebels of Syria suddenly managed to manufacture large amount of chemical weapons. Not impossible, mind you, just very unlikely.

Was it government then? In that case Bashar al-Assad either got very, very cocky, or just stupid. Attacking population center with chemical weapons? Even if it were just rebels they hurt ir would be really, really stupid move, as he was bound to know that such move would draw some really unwanted attention.

Be it either way, it happened, and the president (with very, very small p there) of US deemed it fit to retaliate by bombing Syrian army base. Where there very likely were Russian troops. They did warn Russians first (AFAIK), which was kinda nice, but nevertheless, this was bound to raise some serious issues between these two major powers.

What did happen was that Russians chose to drop out of their agreement with US to inform each other of what they were doing. At the moment I heard of this, I went 'uh oh, this won't be good'.

I would not be surprised if Russians were to attack some US troops now. Purely by mistake of course, they just happened to be where rebels were as well. Maybe few times over, before they re-neg their previous tell-then-kill agreement.

Or possibly it will turn out worse. Both of these major powers will benefit if Europe suffers, so what if they turn this conflict into a proxy war? Russian supporting government (ie. al-Assad), US supporting rebels. No direct contact between nations (I'd guess they'd try to avoid that as much as possible, otherwise they'd run a risk of turning this into real WWIII), but that would mean even more refugees and unrest within Europe, potentially being of benefit to both of them. And then there is the possibility of situation turning turning into "whoever controls the region controls the oil".

I just hope I am being paranoid. Because these scenarios sure aren't fun.