Paris burning: War with ISIS just got hotter by a few degrees

A horrendous series of attacks in Paris, apparently by ISIS, have reportedly left at least 153 dead.

This after it was reported earlier in the day that "Jihadi John" of beheading videos fame was killed in a US drone strike, and the Kurds and genocide-threatened Yazidis recaptured the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS.

The Paris attack is a day after a Hezbollah-controlled suburb of Beirut was bombed by an ISIS twin suicide attack, and less than two weeks after the apparent downing of the Russian jetliner by ISIS over Sinai.

When combined with the ISIS twin suicide attack in Ankara (the deadliest ever terrorist incident in modern Turkey) just a little over a month ago, the group has now inflicted four mass casualty attacks against four diverse target states within just five weeks: one Shia, one Sunni, one Catholic, one Orthodox.

And even as the international powers reconvene at Vienna for Syria peace talks this weekend, the fate of Assad and his Alawite minority regime appears as intractable a disagreement as ever.

The Paris attacks have already inflicted the first curfew in Paris since World War II, in addition to President Francois Hollande's emergency closing of French borders.

Are the chickens now coming home to roost for Europe? EU potentate German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under unprecedented domestic pressure for her open-arms policy towards Mideast refugees; perhaps this French disaster will compel her to slow down the rapid absorption of up to one million predominantly Syrian migrants. It absolutely doesn't help that cries of "For Syria!" were mixed with "Allah Akbar!" as the attackers cut down their helpless victims.

Vladimir Putin is no doubt smiling grimly behind all the consolation calls he's been making...France and Europe as a whole are in no position to retaliate strongly against ISIS without his help.

And the US? Well, just yesterday, Obama declared that ISIS has been "contained" and isn't gaining strength; needless to say, rabid right-wingers are mocking him for it now. In fact, Obama's technically right: ISIS has on the whole been contained since its peak in summer 2014. But events like today's massacres in Paris show that containment of such an entity is incompatible with open borders.

It would be quite shocking if something doesn't give now that more Europeans than ever will sense a critical choice between a wall and a total war to destroy ISIS. In fact Europe needs both: more secure borders and a tougher assault on the terror state. On both points, she looks set to lean even more heavily towards Moscow.