Thankfully the war is starting. Read this.
Subject: DISARMING A COUNTRY by Thomas Sowell
> History does not literally repeat itself, but sometimes it comes awfully
> close. Iraq is not the first dangerous dictatorship that international
> agreements tried to keep disarmed. Nor is it the first where that effort
> failed.
>
> Back in the 1930s, Germany's military forces were limited by a ban on
> conscription, by limitations on the number and kinds of weapons it could
> have, and by a requirement that it station no troops in its own
> industrialized Rhineland. These requirements were in the treaty of
> Versailles, which ended the First World War. Demilitarizing the Rhineland
> was perhaps the crucial provision of these international restrictions.
>
> Germany's population and industrial might, together with its strong
> military traditions and its aggressive policies which had brought on the
> First World War, made it the most dangerous nation on the continent of
> Europe. But it could not attack any other nation when its own industrial
> heartland was undefended and therefore could be quickly seized by French
> troops, who were just across the Rhine.
>
> Like Saddam Hussein today, Hitler at first pretended to go along with
these
> restrictions, all the while clandestinely building up his military forces.
> However, this was clandestine only in the sense that the general public
did
> not know about it. British intelligence was well aware of what he was
doing
> and kept the Prime Minister informed. The real question was whether Prime
> Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted to be the one to break the bad news to the
> British public or whether he would keep quiet, get re-elected, and pass
the
> problem on to his successors -- as Bill Clinton would do in a later era.
> Baldwin did a Clinton.
>
> In later years, Stanley Baldwin tried to justify his inaction:
>
> "Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming,
> and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy
> would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything
> that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more
> certain." But this was not just Baldwin's failure or that of his
> Conservative Party. The Liberal Party in 1935 demanded "clear proof" of a
> need to act against Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile the Labour Party was
> advocating disarmament and innumerable groups were promoting international
> agreements and diplomatic exchanges as a substitute for military power.
> Diplomatic agreements and arms limitations treaties proliferated
throughout
> the whole period between the two World Wars.
>
> None of this had any practical effect, except to lull the Western
> democracies into inaction while Germany and Japan rapidly built up their
> military forces. Hitler began openly violating the restrictions put on
> Germany, one at a time, allowing him to guage what reaction there would be
> among the Western powers and in the League of Nations. Each violation that
> he got away with led him to try another -- and then another.
>
> The key violation -- without which he would not be able to wage war -- was
> moving German troops into the Rhineland in 1936, in open defiance of the
> treaty of Verailles. Both he and his generals knew that the French army
was
> so overwhelmingly more powerful at this point that German troops would not
> have been able to put up even token resistance if France sent its troops
in
> to oust them.
>
> France did nothing. It was the first of many nothings that Fance did in a
> series of crises that led up to World War II. When Hitler had built up his
> clandestine forces sufficiently, he simply stopped keeping them secret and
> confronted the West with enough power that he knew they would not dare to
> challenge him. The opportunity to stop him was past. Those who wanted
> "clear proof" now had it. In just a few years, they would have even
clearer
> proof when the Nazis invaded France and subjugated it in just six weeks --
> and then began bombing London, night after night.
>
> While history does not literally repeat itself, sometimes it comes very
close.
>
> This article appeared at townhall.com on January 30,2003
> |
