Having ended "military action" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc., now war drums have begun beating again in anticipation of the "need" for American or Israeli "military action" to eliminate a nuclear threat from Iran to the United States or to Israel - it has been referenced in Republican presidential debates and in foreign affairs publications. Yet, Mossad directors [Israel's CIA equivalent] past and current are not overly concerned. Who is right? Who should fear such a threat most?

Contrast Islamic jihadist publications that see the United States as the Great Satan which inspires cultural changes or corruption among their youth and women of which they do not approve. No, it is not our freedom or prosperity that incites such religious fervor as to commit suicide to kill us. It is our relative decadence versus their Islamic purity that incites their religious fervor and our mutual deaths.

They see Israel as the little Satan that successfully exercised a two-thousand-year-old claim on a sliver of Middle Eastern real estate. Palestine was a British protectorate. Hitler suggested it receive the Jews that he was gathering around Europe. Britain rejected that notion. Citing "never again," displaced Jews seized an ancestral homeland from the British and resident Arabs. To their credit, they accepted continued Arab presence as valuable members of a now Israeli society.

Truly, I wish Israel well. Typically, without interference, the Israeli defend themselves quite well against hostile neighbors as they improve weapons that the American military-industrial complex and others sell them.

But I don't want to give American tax-payer funded weapons to anyone as we have done repeatedly.

As he left the U.S. presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and we have seen his warnings come to fruition.

We have had over a century of entangling and often conflicting alliances, which, long ago, our founding fathers warned us against. I don't care that the Queen of Great Britain has honored former American presidents Ronald Wilson Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush with the highest order of non-heridatary knighthood after they left office, for preserving her remnant of empire and her wealth.

To what avail has Britain ever been our ally, except to their own benefit? World War I? World War II? Kuwait? Of what benefit is NATO to America? To involve us in another European war?

Randy Reynolds
Secretary, former Chairman
Libertarian Party of Rockdale County