Those who think the Cold War was bogus can come up with no motivation for our support of various dubious characters except our imperialistic impulses. Those who refuse to accept that there is a threat from the Arab world will do the same. The oil issue, as I pointed out earlier, is no small matter if Saddam is a burgeoning Hitler. We did not have the luxury of waiting to find out if the move on Kuwait was trivial or not, since the rest of the Arabian peninsula was unable to defend itself.
When Hitler annexed Danzig, which is now the Polish city of Gdansk, and which had been internationalized under the League of Nations, Chamberlain made a remark about not shedding a drop of blood for Danzig. When Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, according to William Shirer (a correspondent in Berlin at the time, with high ranking contacts), the Germans were unprepared to fight, and would have pulled back when challenged, but they were not. When Hitler swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia after having been awarded the Sudetenland, there were mere diplomatic protests. All of this emboldened Hitler to become more adventurous, convinced him of Western decadence, and provided him with more resources for the looming war effort. Can anyone blame policy makers for being desperate not to make the same mistakes as were made by the democracies in the run up to WWII? |
