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World War II: The ever-present
analogy
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In 1966, two years after Congress
approved the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that
authorized US escalation in the Vietnam War,
then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
J William Fulbright, deplored both the decision and the
debate surrounding it.
"We Americans," he writes
in his classic critique of US policy, The Arrogance of
Power, "are severely, if not uniquely, afflicted with a
habit of policy-making by analogy: North Vietnam's
involvement in South Vietnam, for example, is equated
with Hitler's invasion of Poland and a parley with the
Viet Cong would represent 'another Munich'.
"The
treatment of slight and superficial resemblances as if
they were full-blooded analogies - as instances, as it
were, of history 'repeating itself' - is a substitute
for thinking and a misuse of history."
Fulbright, of course, was completely vindicated
in his argument that Ho Chi Minh was neither the
equivalent of Adolf Hitler; nor was he the puppet of an
expansionist international communist movement
orchestrated by Moscow and/or Beijing, as the hawks of
the 1960s insisted. Nonetheless, the mis-analogy led
directly to the loss of more than 50,000 US lives, not
to mention an estimated 2 million Vietnamese.
Yet 36 years later, it appears that Americans
have utterly failed to rid themselves of this
affliction, if the ongoing debate over what to do in
Iraq - and now North Korea, as well - is any indication.
For months, the public debate has been ringing
with renewed warnings against appeasement and Munich, as
well as other analogies taken from World War II which,
despite the Vietnam debacle, remains the war of choice
for modern-day hawks, probably because, more than half a
century later, no one doubts that Washington was on the
right side of a "just war".
In the hawks' view,
anything less than destroying the regime of Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein now will amount to
"appeasement", if not of the same kind as British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain's notorious sell-out of
Czechoslovakia at the 1938 Munich conference (after
which he claimed credit for achieving "peace in our
time"), then comparable to the more esoteric failure of
France and Britain to respond forcefully to Adolf
Hitler's unilateral repossession of the Rhineland in
1936.
"When Hitler occupied the Rhineland and
the Anschluss in Austria, no nation tried to stop him,"
thundered Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens during
the Senate debate over Iraq earlier this month.
"Instead, the world repeatedly gave in to an obnoxious,
aggressive leader to avoid war ... But as one who fought
in China, I see the next Hitler in Saddam Hussein."
This leitmotif has been repeated
ceaselessly by the hawks on the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and the
National Review, as well as in interviews, speeches and
testimony by those most closely associated with Vice
President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld.
In an interview with Fox News in
August, for example, Rumsfeld made a direct parallel
between Hitler and Hussein. "Think of all the countries
that said, 'Well, we don't have enough evidence [to
attack Germany]'," said Rumsfeld. "Mein Kampf
[Hitler's infamous book] had been written. Hitler had
indicated what he intended to do. 'Maybe he won't attack
us' [they said]. Well, there are millions of dead
because of the miscalculations."
Similarly,
Richard Perle, the influential chairman of Rumsfeld's
Defense Policy Board has cited Munich as a justification
for the administration's new policy of preemption
against rogue states, beginning with Iraq. "A preemptive
strike against Hitler at the time of Munich would have
meant an immediate war as opposed to the one that came
later," he said recently. "Later was much worse."
While some analysts have conceded that Saddam
Hussein's ruthlessness and regional - as opposed to
global - ambitions may have offered some rough parallels
to Hitler's early moves, the fact that the United States
under George Bush Sr did respond to Iraq's 1990 invasion
of Kuwait and that US warplanes fly daily over more than
half the country should have ended talk of appeasement.
Now, according to ex-Vietnam hawk Patrick
Buchanan, the analogy is farcical. "Hitler conquered all
of Europe from the Arctic to the Aegean and from the
Atlantic to Stalingrad," he wrote recently. "And Saddam?
He invaded Kuwait, a sandbox half the size of Denmark,
and got tossed out after a 100-hour ground war. His
country has been over-flown 40,000 times by US and
British planes and he has not been able to shoot a
single plane down. He has no navy, a fourth-rate air
force, a shrunken, demoralized army. His economy is not
1 percent of ours."
The hawks have more recently
added another World War II analogy to the question of
what to do with Iraq after a US invasion, a question the
administration still cannot clearly answer. Already last
summer, prominent neo-conservatives outside the
administration began suggesting a parallel between US
efforts to rebuild - indeed re-make, under extended US
military occupation - Germany and Japan after World War
II and what would be needed in Iraq.
Among the
first was Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and co-founder with William Kristol
of the Project for a New American Century, a largely
neo-conservative think tank whose positions on the "war
against terrorism" have largely pre-figured policies
adopted by the Bush administration.
"If the Bush
administration is serious," he wrote in The Washington
Post, "then the United States is on the verge of making
a huge commitment in Iraq and the Middle East, not
unlike the commitment it made in Japan more than a
half-century ago ... American policy in Japan, as in
Germany, was 'nation-building' on a grand scale, and
with no exit strategy. Almost six decades later there
are still American troops on Japanese soil. Iraq may not
be that different."
Sure enough, within two
months, anonymous senior administration officials,
evoking the memory of Washington's pro-consul in Tokyo,
General Douglas MacArthur, began telling reporters that
Baghdad may have to be administered by US military
authorities for at least a few years. That analogy
unleashed a storm of critics.
"Nothing that went
on is a model for Iraq," said John Dower, the foremost
expert on the US occupation of Japan. "Virtually
everything that made the occupation of Japan a success
is absent form the current situation."
Chalmers
Johnson, one of the US's leading Japan specialists,
noted that Japan, completely unlike Iraq, was a
homogeneous society undivided by ethnicity or religion.
"The Bush White House and the Rumsfeld Pentagon seem to
know next to nothing about Japan," he added.
(Inter Press Service)
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