Karl Rove may be on the verge of indictment. Tom DeLay's corrupt money machine that has established a Republican stranglehold on Congress, probably unequaled since the corrupt power excercised by the First Bank of the United States was stopped in its tracks by Andrew Jackson, is now being exposed and knocked off its tracks by the law. Public support for Bush's Iraq War has effectively collapsed (although most of Congress is taking an extraordinarily long time for that to sink into their skulls). Katrina exposed how little Dear Leader's administration has done in homeland security preparedness; national emergency response has actually seriously deteriorated over the last four years.
Dear Leader Bush's misrule is coming undone, in other words.
Things have gotten so bad that he's actually talking about Bin Laden again! Not that he's doing anything different. It's the same old thing, cheer for the war in Iraq and pretend it had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
And, by an amazing coincidence, Dear Leader's hyper-accurate super-secret intelligence sources that did such a brilliant job on Saddam's WMDs, has just discovered a new terrorist threat against New York! Can a revived color-coded terror alert system be far behind?
The official text of Dear Leader's address of 10/06/05 is available at the White House Web site: President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy. One item in his speech struck me in particular:
Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme -- and they should not be dismissed. Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, "We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life." And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously - and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.
It seems like every time America goes to war now, we discover that the enemy of the day is a new Hitler.
This has become such a stock line that I often barely notice it. But I have just finished reading the excellent new paper by military historian Jeffrey Record: Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Strategic Studies Institute [US Army]; August 2005; *.pdf file). I'll probably have more to say about it in another post.
But one of the things he emphasizes is that many of the Hitler analogies we hear so often are superficial to the point of frivolity. There were three particular aspects of Hitler's National Socialist regime that foredoomed the Anglo-French policy of appeasement to failure. ("Appeasement" at the time simply referred to compromise through negotiations; it didn't not have the pejorative sense of cowardice or fecklessness that it later acquired.)
One is that Hitler's own intentions - primarily seizing Russia's western territories and killing the Jews - were such that they could never be permanently satisfied with any conceivable compromise the European powers could have made. Another is that the aggressive inclinations of the Nazi regime were such that it could not be deterred from military aggression by shows of force for more than limited periods. And Hitler and his party ruled a state with the military and economic capability to push their plans into action and have a chance of success.
Now, loyal followers of Dear Leader wouldn't miss a beat in saying, well of course all that applies to Bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein, or whoever is Dear Leader's Hitler analogy of the moment. But Jeffrey Record, writing from the "reality-based" world, concludes:
No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. The scope of Hitler’s nihilism, ambitions, and military power posed a mortal threat to Western civilization. No other authoritarian or totalitarian regime has managed to employ such a powerful military instrument in such an aggressive manner to fulfill such a horrendous agenda. Stalin had great military power but was cautious and patient; he was a realist and neither lusted for war nor discounted the strength and will of the Soviet Union’s enemies. Mao Zedong was reckless but militarily weak. Ho Chi Minh’s ambitions and fighting power were local. And Saddam Hussein was never in a position to reverse U.S. military domination of the Persian Gulf. Who but Hitler was so powerful and unappeasable and undeterrable?
Juan Cole "fisked" Dear Leader's speech on his Informed Consent blog: Arguing with Bush and the GWOT 10/07/05. He writes of Dear Leader's Hitler analogy:
A wise leader has to be able to judge the moment, and to see things in proportion to their importance. Bin Laden is simply not a Hitler. There is no country in which he or his minions are about to become Chancellor. It is a joke to think that Zawahiri, who is not even respected by the Egypt-based al-Jihad al-Islami, has any chance of taking over Egypt! Al-Qaeda is not even an organization. It is a loose set of radical ideas that small fringe groups can take up at will. It is not German National Socialism. It is the contemporary Ku Klux Klan.
He also takes on Dear Leader's we-can't-back-down, our-God-is-bigger-than-their-God line. From Dear Leader's speech, as he merrily conflated the Iraqi insurgency with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda:
Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.
Cole sensibly responds to this pitch:
It is true that Bin Laden taunts the US about withdrawing from Lebanon and Somalia when hit in those places. But Bin Laden's childish taunts do not change the fact that the US was right to withdraw in both places. No amount of Marines in Lebanon would have made a difference in 1983 (the Israelis made the big mistake of trying to stay in southern Lebanon, and just got themselves blown up and driven out). Bush senior was wrong to send US troops to Somalia in the first place; they had no defined military mission there. And, Bin Laden's taunts are slyer than Bush reads them, since they are designed to draw the US into a quagmire in the Muslim world where Muslim radicals can do to US troops what they had earlier done to Soviet ones in Afghanistan. The taunt is a trap. Bush is too thick to avoid the trap being laid for him.
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