Hindsight

As a serial pessimist, it's really only fair that I should from time to time own up to spots where the disaster envisaged didn't happen.
Back in 2004 I posted

Friday, October 29, 2004
The start of a long war
I'm shocked and astonished at how little the world seems to fear the blowup in southern Thailand. As someone who can remember how the Sri Lankan war began, this seems to presage a fierce war, and one that will drag in Malaysia, and increase its national touchiness, and lead to worse relations with Singapore, and send ASEAN down in flames, and start another arc of instability between the moslem world and the Chinese hegemony. Shinawath seems to be as clueless as bush, and there really is no good news.

While Thailand does seem quite likely to lurch into disaster any day now, it does seem likely to be a completely different disaster, and I haven't seem any reports from the South for a while. Mind you, the separatists may simply have found it impossible to get the government's attention, it being somewhat distracted. But still.