What the Heck was I Thinking!?

Jay Tea at Wizbang Blog has posted one of those “history repeats itself” articles in An uncomfortable parallel - Wizbang

In short, what we’re seeing are more and more acts of war, moving from the sub rosa to the flagrant and into the world of the indisputable and unavoidable. It reminds me of the relationship between the United States and Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.

And what I don’t like about it is that in this case, Iran is the United States — and we are Nazi Germany.

I fail to see this part of his parallelism. I’m not against looking for historical precedent, so to speak, for what’s happening now. What I object to is the characterization of Nazi Germany as a reluctant enemy of the US. They may have feared engaging us, but they were perfectly comfortable in attacking US interests and allies across Europe.
The US isn’t looking to take over Iran, or even Iraq for that matter. We’re trying to clean out the political landscape there to reduce the number of places where Islamo-fascist terrorists can hide, train, recuperate, and regroup.
If there is a parallel, and I think there can be to a slight degree only, it is between Great Britain prior to the war and the US now. We are carefully looking everywhere but at the source of most of the trouble in the Middle East/Southwest Asia region. We have even found our own Neville Chamberlain - we just had to find a larger collection of them in the Baker-Hamilton commission.
We are, after all, a much greater super power than Great Britain was in 1939.

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Sometimes, for some people, free choice must appear like the Sirens’ song - seductive, but destructive. 

Why is it that 15 years after the Communist regime in the Soviet Union fell, and the Communist regime in China transformed out of all recognition of a truly Communist economic model, we saw the rise of Islamo-fascist regimes in Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, secular fascist regimes in Iraq and Syria, and thugocracies (every gang gets a vote) in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories?

Could it be that there is a large segment of the world’s population that craves certainty at any price? A segment that is afraid of freedom, choice, autonomy, independence?

I recall the scene in Moscow on the Hudson, in which Robin Williams goes to a store to buy a pound of coffee. He nearly has a breakdown when he’s confronted with an entire aisle of choices for a pound of coffee. 

Some people don’t feel they have the power or knowledge to pick wisely (or lack the experience in doing that). Others wisely realise that they’d never be picked by the populace in a free and open election. In both these cases, democracy is the enemy.