quote: I see no point to imagining a "series of terrorist attacks", and the political consequences of such a series.   If you put enough conditions on your scenario, you can always get the answer you want.   Sounds like stacking the deck to me.

And that sounds to me like a begrudging way of saying yes, you do agree that demented leaders, under extreme conditions such as a series of terrorist attacks or having all the other world powers declare war on them, can get away with things that would be unthinkable otherwise.

That's the simple reality that Buchan's article is based on. The Holocaust, which after the fact has been given as the primary proof that it was necessary to go to war against Hitler, could never have happened without that war, his dementia notwithstanding. If the the Polish junta, under orders from the Allies, had given back the 95 percent German city of Danzig that was unfairly taken away after WWI, then Hitler would not have been able to marshal support for an invasion of Poland. And his actions and statements prior to that indicate he'd have had no interest in it.

But the Allies were obstinate about Danzig, because they wanted Hitler to invade Poland. They wanted it as a pretext for going to war against Germany -- not because they wanted to prevent the Holocaust, and I hope not because they particularly wanted to unleash conditions that would lead to it, but because they didn't give the flying obscenity that Michael mentioned earlier what happened to the Jews of central Europe and were willing to sacrifice any number of people of any ethnicity in order to consolidate power and maintain supremacy.

Hitler's use of military force to repatriate German areas held by neighboring countries was deplorable, but it was nothing out of the ordinary among powerful nations, and trivial compared to the various wars the UK and US have launched before and since that time to gain and keep control of territory all over the world. It could not have been the real motive for going to war against him. It was a pretext, just as the 9/11 attacks were used as a pretext for invading Iraq, and probably an engineered pretext, like Roosevelt's ultimatum to Japan and the attack on Pearl Harbor that was Japan's only possible response.