Sorry for the vulgarity, but I couldn’t think of a better way to say it.

From NPR’s coverage:

The group’s self-declared caliphate includes larges swaths of eastern Syria and western Iraq and ISIS effectively serves as a government, running the courts and the schools, collecting taxes and the trash.

Yet over the past two weeks, ISIS says it carried out three major terror strikes on three separate continents. In addition to the Paris attacks, the group also claims it blew up the Russian plane over Egypt and carried out suicide bombings that killed more than 40 people Thursday in Beirut, Lebanon.

…

William McCants, a Middle East analyst at the Brookings Institution and author ofThe ISIS Apocalypse, says the group’s motives are not clear. But notes that ISIS has lost about 25 percent of its territory in the past year and is feeling increased pressure from opponents that include the U.S., France, Russia and Iran.

“My suspicion is that [ISIS leaders] see these strikes as a deterrent, but they have miscalculated, and that it will serve rather to galvanize the international community to increase their efforts to destroy its government in Syria and Iraq,” he told The Washington Post.

I really hope that’s correct.  People do seem to care a lot more now that Paris has been attacked.  Maybe that’s the silver lining: if the the Western World wasn’t taking ISIS seriously before, it will now.  #RussianLivesMatter

I certainly don’t want to see American troop deployments to the Middle East (I think we’ve learned our lesson), but sending some of our most bad ass special ops guys over there seems like a fair response; they can teach ISIS how we collect trash.