On the Soapbox

Donald Rumsfeld said today that those who oppose the Bush Administration's war in Iraq "seem not to have learned history's lessons." He specifically referred to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930's, comparing our resistance against the war in Iraq to Chamberlain's policy towards Hitler. With Rumsfeld echoing Santayana's famous "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," the apropos retort would be, "Those who misinterpret and misapply the lessons of the past are condemned to make even worse blunders."

Rumsfeld's analogy of the anti-war sentiment to British appeasement is flawed in that, before the destabilizing invasion, Iraq was not a source of terrorism. A failure to pursue al-Qaeda would be appeasement, not a failure to pursue Saddam. It should be noted that many in the CIA believe that Rumsfeld's early preoccupation with Iraq in 2001 resulted in insufficient resources and troops for Afghanistan and the subsequent failure to capture top al-Qaeda leaders at Tora Bora. In a way, this obsession with Iraq instead of the real targets has resulted in us giving our modern-day "Hitler" quite a helping hand.

So what is the correct analogy, if there is one? Our war in Iraq has effectively amounted to something that would have been analogous to us going to war with the Soviet Union in the 1930's: Hitler would have been delighted at the prospect of the Allies exhausting their resources fighting an enemy that (at the time) posed no threat to the Allies and that was not closely aligned with Hitler. Not only has Iraq weakened us, Rumsfeld's foolhardy invasion of Iraq has created a breeding ground for new terrorists where none existed before. It is still not a perfect analogy (as perfectly analogous situations are really quite rare in history), but it is certainly a better one than what Rumsfeld is proposing. Methinks Rumsfeld would have done poorly with the SAT's analogies.