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Nazi Germany had no WMDs
Not everyone remembers that the principal factor pushing the U.S. to develop the atomic bomb during World War II was the fear that Nazi Germany was developing it. But when the Allies entered Germany in 1945 they found to their immense surprise that the German atomic program was in a backward stage; Hitler, for whatever reason, had not pursued the bomb as he had been reasonably expected to do. By the logic of today’s antiwar critics, this would seem to mean that the American war on Nazi Germany was illegitimate. Yes, the Germans declared war on the U.S. first. But they didn’t actually attack us, did they? And isn’t it true, by the lights of today’s antiwar critics, that if any statement or belief in support of a war turns out after the fact to be incorrect, the whole war was really a fraud? Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 21, 2003 11:20 AM | Send Comments
I believe there are good reasons to have opposed the invasion of Iraq and that there are good reasons to oppose the ongoing occupation. This analogy is flawed, though. In the case of Germany and Italy in 1941, those governments did declare war on the United States, opportunistically three days after the Japanese attacks in the Pacific. By that time, Germany had run amok in Europe and North Africa and was in fight to the death with Great Britain and France (our allies) and the Soviet Union (not our ally, no matter what Franklin Roosevelt thought). In December 1941, the Axis seemed to be getting the better of the fighting. German submarines had already sunk American ships, including a U.S. destroyer. At sea, Germany was capable of posing a serious threat, as the U-boats’ slaughter of U.S. merchant shipping along our Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the first six months of our war shows. Iraq in 2003 posed no such threat, and issued no declarations of war. Compared to the real Hitler, Saddam Hussein is a distinctly second-rate despot. I don’t believe invoking WWII really helps either side in the argument about whether our Iraq war is justified. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on November 21, 2003 12:42 PMStrictly speaking, the Nazis did have a nuclear bomb project, but it was pursued at such a low level of funding and so afflicted with basic errors it could not have produced a bomb for quite a number of years. Also, while there is a good deal of disagreement about this among historians, I suspect that Hitler’s declaration of war was not “opportunistic” but more in the spirit of “let us leap in before they push us,” and, in a more pragmatic vein, to preserve relations with Japan. In practice, the US was in a state of undeclared war with Germany from Roosevelt’s “shoot on sight order” of September 11, 1941. Hitler preferred to get in his formal declaration of war first, for prestige reasons. Posted by: Alan Levine on November 21, 2003 4:34 PMOn Saturday, I posted a comment here
of making World War II comparisons is flawed, and has been implemented by liberals and statists in order to justify state-sponsored intervention, massive spending, and government expansion. (Bill Clinton and his friend Phony Blair did this during the 1990’s.) As I’ve stated in several of my past writings and blog entries, the adminstration made clear what their *pivotal* rationale for this war was. I stated that in one of my recent blog entries and in this guest blog entry. In that guest blog entry from July, as well as in this more recent one, I pointed to this comment post of mine (responding to this entry As you can see from the links and information in that comment post, comparisons of this war to other wars in our nation’s history are not valid… Our administration made clear that the war with Iraq was a *conditional* war - one that could be averted if Iraq met a certain condition that was set for them. For Nazi Germany, the President of the United States, the U.S. Secretary of State, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense made set not such conditions to determine whether we would go to war, as they did in this case. And I especially agree with the last paragraph in Mr. Sutherland’s post. Those who wish to continue to justify what the administration did should do so primarily based upon the claims that the administration put forth, about the major threat that Iraq posed to our national security, and that the war was [supposedly] necessary to prevent another atrocity like 9/11. Posted by: Aakash on November 24, 2003 3:55 AMI ask the poster “Aakash,” if he has a point, to make it, not to burden us with links to his entire oeuvre. I was not comparing WWII as a totality with the Iraq war as a totality. I was not saying the Iraq war was justified because the war against Nazi Germany was justified. I was simply making one, discrete point, that, as with Iraq, we also thought the Nazis were working on WMDs, that we were mightily concerned about that, that it turned out their WMD program was not as advanced as we thought, and that, if the people back then had used the “hindsight” wisdom shown by today’s anti-war people, this would have meant that the war against Germany—or, at least, the Manhattan Project—was unjustified. Indeed, there have been people who have made that argument, both back then and now. They conveniently forget the rational basis the U.S. had for fearing Nazi A-bomb development, just as they conveniently forget the rational basis the U.S. had for fearing Iraqi WMDs. So there are certainly enough points of comparison to make the WWII analogy worth mentioning, even though (as with all analogies between different cases), the similarily relates to one or two aspects of the respective cases, not to all aspects. That we thought Germany was developing WMDS, and that we found out on conquering Germany that they weren’t, is a striking enough historical fact in itself, one would think. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on November 24, 2003 9:28 AM |