mahnmut

<tr> </tr> <td valign="top" align="left"> </td> The Hitler analogy

September 1, 2006 / Ruthland Herald
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The Bush administration is ratcheting up its rhetoric about Iraq and Iran in a way that ought to alarm everyone.

President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have inaugurated a new campaign to describe Islamist terrorists as fascists and to accuse those who are critical of their policies of appeasement.

Appeasement is a dirty word left over from World War II when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and others sought to appease Hitler rather than confront him. By using the rhetoric of World War II, Bush and Rumsfeld are seeking to draw a stark line between good and evil. The same comparison was used to demonize Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Iraq.

The fascism equation is a useful way to halt actual thinking and diplomacy that might actually solve problems. After all, if Hitler is alive in Tehran, then war might be the only recourse. If you want to appease Hitler, you are a coward.

Alarmist rhetoric about Iran's nuclear program is another useful tool for driving people toward war — which today is known euphemistically as regime change. Those who remember back to the days before the Iraq war years may recollect Condoleezza Rice's grim warnings about the mushroom cloud.

We need to keep in mind the serious threat posed by Islamist extremists and by Iran's nuclear program. But the Hitler analogy needs to be questioned.

Hitler was the dictator of a powerful industrialized nation bent on territorial conquest and genocide. Long before the United States entered World War II, Hitler had conquered most of Europe, and Germany was raining bombs on Britain.

No nation in the Middle East contemplates this level of aggression.

There are dangerous players in the Middle East, including al-Qaida and Iran. But the terrorist threat comes from many different groups with differing agendas. To call them all fascists oversimplifies our view of them and threatens to oversimplify our response.

It is possible to see elements of fascism in some of the movements of the Middle East. The death-obsessed and virulently anti-Semitic Arabs who make war on Israel need to be halted in their bomb factories. Al-Qaida and other Islamist extremists have already shown the level of destruction to which they will allow their ideological hatred of the United States to drive them. They must be opposed, and their ill intentions must be defeated.

But these, and the nation of Iran, are not Nazi Germany. This sort of threat must be countered with the kind of diplomacy, intelligence and judicious force with which the United States has responded to threats for the past half century. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb, and shrewd diplomacy may still prevent it from obtaining one. It's certain that equating President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Hitler will not move him toward a diplomatic solution.

It is ironic that the leader most resembling Hitler was Saddam Hussein. He invaded his neighbors; he used poison gas to carry out genocide. As Peter Galbraith, writing in The Boston Globe, points out, Saddam's great appeasers were Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as Donald Rumsfeld, who visited him in Baghdad, winking at his murders, providing him with aid for his war against Iran.

The American people need to beware belligerent policies designed to correct the mistakes of the past but destined only to compound them.