August 30, 2006--Again With The Nazis?

First the President spoke about how we are waging war with “Islamic fascists,” next Joe Lieberman chimed in to remind us that the situation in Iraq is just like the early days of Hitler, and then just the other day Rumsfeld and Cheney reminded us that we “seem not have learned history’s lessons” from that era. (See NY Times story below.)

They remind me of the first line of Sam Cooke’s 1950s hit, “Wonderful World” because they—

“Don’t know much about history.”

And thus we have a Terrible World.

After 9/11, conflating those horrific events with the regime in Iraq, the rationale for invading was that since Saddam was linked to al Qaeda and he had weapons of mass destruction we needed to clean them out or he would turn them over to the terrorists and they then would drop dirty A Bombs on New York and Washington. So we went to war. But did not find any WMDs.

Rather then withdrawing out troops at that point, which as it turns out probably would have been a good idea and it would have been in some ways legitimate to have proclaimed “Mission Accomplished,” we stayed on guided by rationale number two—Saddam is a tyrant who “made war against his own people” and this we will stay on to remove him and bring democracy to Iraq (and in a series of good dominos) to the rest of the Middle East.

When it subsequently became clear that this was not working very well and many thousands of US troops were being killed and wounded (forget civilians for the moment), the third rationale was that we needed to “stay the course” in order to support our soldiers and thereby demonstrate that their sacrifices had not been made in vain.

And now, as the public has so dramatically withdrawn its support for that justification for the war, we are seeing the clear emergence of the fourth rationale—to quote Rumsfeld again, since “a new type of fascism” is emerging, to cut and run now would be to “appease” these Moslem neo-Nazis as the West appeased the real Nazis. And we know what happened then—it led to World War II.

Let me suggest a few differences between then and now: the Nazis garnered widespread support in Germany for their ascent to power—they actually were elected. In Iraq, through the democratic process the Bush administration helped to engender, a coalition government, whatever we think of it, was overwhelmingly elected and it is attempting to bring stability to the country. Nazi Germany was a substantially homogeneous society—they had Protestants and Catholics and yes Jews, but there was no evidence of any incipient civil war that would undermine Germany’s ability to invade and take control of most of Europe.

And then of course Germany was the world’s leading military power. They had their day’s version of weapons of mass destruction—it was called blitzkrieg. And the rest of Europe and the US were relatively weak, having substantially disarmed during the previous three decades.

None of this is to say that there are not real threats out there and we should remain strong and vigilant—9/11 and other acts of terror and violence are cases in point. But any neutral historian would say that our unilateral behavior has made things worse in this regard than better.

So, if Rumsfeld and Cheney and Lieberman (forget Bush—he doesn’t read) want to cite history, maybe they should bone up on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It might sound familiar.