>>Addressed to a UK resident who may know the French better than many here: it's a bad idea to attack the French. Unlike UK and US populations, the French won't weep or punish politicians if there are other casualties to take down the terrorists. The Russians are the same. Assuming these attacks were by Isis, it's about the worst own goal they could have come up with to attack those two. IMHO.
>
>My wife is half French (well, almost - one of her grandparents was Russian) and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I don't understand the French at all :-}
>
>But seriously, I think you are right. Opinion here seems to be that IS believe that terrorist attacks are the only way they can retaliate against states using air strikes with no-one on the ground.

That's asymmetrical warfare. The western governments often conduct this kind of war, where their civilian population doesn't even see the war, and the soldiers (recently replaced with troops, each one of them) don't even see the enemy, they fire a joystick and may feel it's a video game. We've all seen footage of that.

So, according to the old adage that every nation has a government it deserves, well, it's the governments who conduct this kind of warfare who frustrate the enemy by being near untouchable (what was it in Vietnam, some 50 thousand vs 3 million?), the enemy, having no resources to play it by their rules, resorts to inventing his own rules, and fights a poor man's war.