I just posted this at Andrei Martyanov’s blog:

Getting fucking tired of Scott Ritter telling everyone that "Israel doesn't want a wider war" and "Hezbollah doesn't want a wider war", and "Iran doesn't want a wider war", and that "the IDF is too tired to invade Lebanon", and the rest of his current hyperbolic/hopium schtick.

The guy needs to give up coffee. He also needs to spend ten seconds thinking it through - as if "what people want" makes the slightest fucking difference in how people actually act.

"The US" doesn't exist. What exists are a cabal of neocons who control the US government and who most definitely want a wider war up to and including Iran. There's also zero doubt that the Israelis want that war, no matter who in the IDF might have second thoughts.

As Alastair Crooke said it (the only guy who "gets it") this is a "Greek tragedy". A Greek tragedy is where bad things happen because people make mistakes because that's who they are and they can't do anything else. This is precisely the situation we're in both in the Middle East and in Europe.

Ritter changes his analysis based on what happened in the last week's news cycle. I haven't changed my analysis in 17 years: war between the US and Iran is inevitable. I listened to Norman Finkelstein on Greenwald's System Update yesterday and he said the exact same thing: a wider war is inevitable.

Bottom line: All you have to do is look at the people involved. Overthinking it from an "intelligence analyst" view is going to come to the wrong conclusions.