Ok Every time Sadam’s name crops up in the debates the Spectre of Hitler looms close by. Every politician and Joe public who is in favour of attacking Iraq mentions the events in the 1930s as if there is a direct connection.
They say we can’t appease Sadam and we must nip him in the bud or else we will be no different than European powers in the late 1930s when it came to dealing with Nazi Germany.
I’m not sure the “lessons” of the 30’s really apply here in this case.
I’m no fan of Hussien, I think he is a tyrannt, a murderer and takes too many risks for his own gain at the expense of the lives of his people, but at the same time I have a hard time with this Hitler/Appeasment analogy.
Hitler clearly wanted to Dominate the Eurpoean continent, does Sadam really want to rule the Middle East? Hitler was given terrirtoies to prevent him from going to war, Was Sadam ever granted any land to stop his war machine?
Please help me understand this corilation. I mean even if other nations wish to avoid attacking or overthrowing him, how is this the same as appeasment in the 1930s??
You’re right, the analogy is terrible, even though both “want” to be more powerful. Hitler was uncontained, and (debatably) uncontainable, leaving only appeasement and war as alternatives. Saddam is containable and contained, and controls less land than he started with.
Comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler is silly. As odius as Hussein is, Iraq isn’t one tenth the threat that Germany was. Germany was powerful enough to conquer most of Europe, North Africa, and Western Russia. Iraq couldn’t even beat a third-rate power like Iran.
That said, the analogy isn’t entirely worthless. I suspect that the decade we’re currently living in will be remembered like the 1930’s as a grim time of growing storm clouds. War with Iraq is more like the Spanish Civil War – a precurser to the major clash of cultures that’s shaping up between the West and the Islamic world.
Actually, Saddam DOES want to rule the Middle East. He wants to create a new Caliphate, a unified Arab state with Baghdad at its center.
But the analogy is still flawed, because Saddam is not the same level of threat as Germany. Granted, Saddam may have a nuclear bomb or two at some point, but that doesn’t compare to having a Wermacht and Luftwaffe when it comes to being able to destroy a lot of things.
The relevant comparison from the '30s is what the League of Nations did in regards to aggression and to nations violating its mandates. The fact that the League was not willing to do anything more than issue a mass of paper when Italy invaded Ethiopia in the '30s was what showed it to be simply a debating society and opportunity for representatives to get together and talk, not a group whose resolutions needed to be taken seriously and a guarantor of World Peace. If the UN isn’t willing to vote to send in troops to enforce its own major resolutions, why is anyone going to listen to them in the future?
Really, I find the attitude towards an invasion of Iraq from people who support the idea of the UN as a real world authority kind of odd. Iraq is violating the terms of the treaty/mandate which ended Gulf War I, so I would expect people that see the UN as the organization that should be in charge of world security to be all in favor of the UN coming down hard on Iraq, but instead it appears that they favor letting Iraq ignore the UN with no consequences.
