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Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
"If we do these things [Israel] wants us to do we will be involved in a very large regional war that stands an excellent chance of destroying Israel. I'm somebody that thinks Israel deserves to exist. This government in Israel is absolutely committed to regional dominance by Israel, and we [Americans are] supposed to underwrite and support this hegemony. The assumption is that if they can't dominate the region they have no security.
"So the next step is to attack Hezbollah, try to make it look like Hezbollah brought it on--and we go from there.
"In the mean time the West Bank erupts, the Gaza war is not over, they may have killed tens of thousands of people and driven hundreds of thousands out. It's not over. ... nobody around Israel wants a war."
But what Netanyahu wants is to escalate...."their answer to everything is escalate. If you escalate you inevitably pull in your vassal state--the United States--and the US Armed Forces will do your bidding. That's where we are. The Israelis are not difficult to figure out--I understand completely what they're doing, and why the larger problem is for the United States. What are we doing?
"Well, we have been bullying, sanctioning, and bombing everyone who doesn't agree with us for years--easily for 30 years. We bombed our way through the Balkans, we waged war in Somalia before we went to the Balkans. That didn't work. What we created in the Balkans is an unsustainable status quo. Then we moved on to the Middle East. We've created a disaster in Afghanistan, we created another one in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya. So what's the answer? The answer is always the same: escalate, bomb some more. This won't work. It hasn't worked. It's not going to work."
The history of the welfare state is the history of the state's savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society. Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the "voluntary sector" of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia]. Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen's social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state's intrusive regime. Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state. The dire effects ...
Sadly, Europe appears to be pursuing the worst lessons of appeasement: the dangerous illusion is that you can temper a ravenous aggressor by conciliation, weakness and generosity. The aggressor immediately sees that the best route for him is to demand more. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
By treating the Iranian regime as a legitimate negotiating partner — and by discounting the moral and strategic gulf that separates it from liberal democracies — Europe is bankrolling the terrorism industry.
--Majid Rafizadeh
