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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 narrow strait is the most important chokepoint for the world's oil supply. Some 21 million barrels — or $1.2 billion worth of oil — pass through the strait every day.
Will a closed Strait hurt Iran? In terms of international oil sales, yes, but in terms of daily life, no. Iran pumps 3.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. The situation at this hour:
Most people hear “Hormuz” and think gas prices.
That’s part of it. But it’s bigger. It’s a central artery for global trade, and we talked about how disruptions hit second-order systems fast, including inputs tied to food production (field work and fertilizers), trucking, and downstream shocks in everything from shipping insurance to medicine, medical supplies, medical treatments and regional stability.
This is why the “we’re energy independent so it doesn’t matter” line is naive. In a globally priced commodity world, you don’t get to opt out.
Former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes to Christ and discovers the supernatural Christian heritage of West, and how worldly families destroyed it. She is now married and living in the US.
"I like Os Guinness’s analogy of the cut flower civilization. I find it very vivid in regard to non-Christian conservative parents. Conservative non-Christian families are cutting themselves off from our foundational roots.
Let’s think about what happens to a plant when the roots die. What happens when you pick flowers and put them in a vase? Obviously, the flowers wither. And if you cut conservative morals off from Christianity, they fade.
"This decline is exactly what we have seen in the West over the last century and a half. Some people say the decay dates back to the Enlightenment. It’s a gradual fading that goes on and on. My fear is that we have landed in a place of moral wilderness.
"For the West to restore itself, it has to rediscover and revive its biblical roots. I insist that the biblical...
