It is usually a sign of desperation when politicians invoke Hitler and the Nazis to justify their actions. And so Donald Rumsfeld evoked Nazi Germany in an op/ed piece yesterday in the Washington Post as he tried to rationalize three years of a failed war policy in Iraq:
Consider that if we retreat now, there is every reason to believe Saddamists and terrorists will fill the vacuum — and the free world might not have the will to face them again. Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis. It would be as great a disgrace as if we had asked the liberated nations of Eastern Europe to return to Soviet domination because it was too hard or too tough or we didn’t have the patience to work with them as they built free countries.
Rumsfeld was roundly criticized for making this ridiculous historical analogy. Here is former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski on CNN:
"That is really absolutely crazy to anyone who knows history," he said. "There was no alternative to our presence. The Germans were totally crushed. For Secretary Rumsfeld to be talking this way suggests either he doesn’t know history or he’s simply demagoguing."
Juan Cole discusses better historical analogies on his blog this morning:
If Rumsfeld considers Saddam to be the analogue of the Nazis here, then his statement is odd. It is completely incredible that Saddam could ever come back to power. Nor can the Baath. Nor can the few hundred foreign fighters take over Iraq in the name of Zarqawi. For the Americans to get out of Iraq would be like any other hand-over by a colonial power of governance to local people. It would be like the French handing Algeria to the National Liberation Front, or like the British handing India to the Congress Party (it could be very much like that, since in the course of the hand-over, India and Pakistan split). For the US to try to keep its ground troops in Iraq will just create a long-term guerrilla insurgency of the sort the Portuguese fought in Angola and Mozambique. Those are non winnable in an age of the political and social mobilization of the people.
Rumsfeld’s boss President Bush tried a similar stunt not long ago, where he compared the War in Iraq to World War II and his own leadership and resolve to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Bush gave that speech on August 30, 2005 – the day the levees burst in New Orleans, drowning hundreds.
rumsfeld Iraq Irak-Krieg Germany
