Remember when Condaleezza Rice was touted as a smart and educated person?
A former Clinton National Security Council aide is taking issue with Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's historical knowledge. Rice, a former Stanford provost, said in a speech last week to the Veterans of Foreign Wars: "1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. . . . SS officers -- called 'werewolves' -- engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces" and cooperating Germans, "much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the group that day that the werewolves "plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings . . . . Does this sound familiar?"
"Well, no, it doesn't," insists former Clinton NSC aide Daniel Benjamin, a former Wall Street Journal bureau chief in Berlin and now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Benjamin, writing in Slate, said the Nazis planned to mount a resistance and then-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower worried about the matter.
But, citing Army and German studies, Benjamin writes that "Werwolf amounted to next to nothing." A new Rand study on nation-building, he said, reports that "the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany -- was zero." The werewolf threat was much ballyhooed by Soviet propagandists to justify imprisoning mostly innocent Germans.
"Werewolf?" As the late Marty Feldman answered that question in "Young Frankenstein": "There wolf. There castle." |
