Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com 16 nov 2015: "former Israeli ambassador to Washington Michael Oren has brazenly stated that ISIS is the "lesser evil." They’re all "bad guys," said Oren, but "we always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran." The Paris attacks are the signal for full-scale Western intervention in Syria, a “pitiless war,” as French President Francois Hollande put it, and the US is likely to follow in his wake. This will achieve another longstanding Israeli goal: the interposition of a substantial Western military force between Israel and its enemies. (Although the Israeli far right doesn’t necessarily agree.)

What we are looking at is a Western expeditionary force aimed at smashing the Islamic State, occupying Syria, and imposing a “negotiated settlement” of the civil war.