Hitler, Hussein and the Lesson of History
By William O. Jenkins, Mar 11, 2003
We hear it from George W. Bush and his fellow chicken hawks. We hear it from talking heads and ditto-heads across the land.
They rail that we must remember the lesson of Adolf Hitler in dealing with Saddam Hussein. We must not repeat the mistake of France and Britain, who failed to stand up to Hitler when he reoccupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland and invaded the Sudetenland.
The only way to deal with Saddam is to deal him a deadly blow now, they say, before he grows too strong. Appeasement will only embolden him. But wait a minute!
Aren't all these history-challenged hawks and heads forgetting something? Kuwait was Saddam’s Sudetenland. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, there was no appeasement. The response was swift and deadly. Saddam got a royal ass-kicking.
The coalition that did the kicking was led primarily by the nations that comprised the Allies of WWII. We did learn our lesson. We dealt with aggression immediately and decisively. There's been containment, not appeasement, ever since.
Unlike Hitler, Saddam's aggression was nipped in the bud. He hasn't stirred beyond his borders since. His only known funding of terrorism has been directed solely against Israel and has been no more egregious than that of his neighbors.
Notably, this includes Saudi Arabia, whose monarchy recently beat out Saddam as the second-worst dictatorship on the planet behind North Korea’s Kim Jong Il in Parade magazine’s recent rating.
Perhaps that's why Israel, which has waged preemptive war in the past -- even a preemptive strike against Iraq -- hasn't seen fit to attack Iraq now. So why should we?
It is also worth remembering that the Gulf War wasn't the first time the United States applied the lesson Hitler taught the Allies. We applied it in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950 and again in Cuba in 1963.
And the British applied it in the Falkland Islands in 1982. In fact, there hasn’t been an instance since World War II when the erstwhile Allies have failed to apply the lesson of Hitler.
There was one time, however, when the United States applied that lesson overzealously. It was a situation in which we acted needlessly against a regime that, like Iraq, did not constitute a credible threat to our national security.
When I think about Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and the lesson of history, I wonder if the chicken hawks, the talking heads and the ditto heads remember what we wound up with that time: a long black granite wall with the names of 58,209 dead Americans on it.
William O. Jenkins
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