A Fatal Distraction
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by Derrick Z. Jackson
Published on Friday, March 26, 2004 by the Boston Globe
IN APRIL OF 2001, Richard Clarke said he raised the specter of Adolf Hitler with Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to explain how serious a threat Al Qaeda was. In his book "Against All Enemies" Clarke said he told Wolfowitz, "sometimes, as with Hitler in `Mein Kampf,' you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do." Clarke said Wolfowitz responded, "I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan."
This week, in his testimony to the commission on the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz said, "I can't recall ever saying anything remotely like that. I don't believe I could have. In fact, I frequently have said something more nearly the opposite of what Clarke attributes to me. I've often used that precise analogy of Hitler and "Mein Kampf" as a reason why we should take threatening rhetoric seriously, particularly in the case of terrorism and Saddam Hussein."
Even as he denied the specific charge, Wolfowitz reconfirmed the general obsession. The administration was so bent on demonizing Saddam Hussein that it may have missed an opportunity to focus on the masterminds of 9/11 who turned commercial flights into weapons of mass destruction.
No one will ever know if demonization cost 3,000 lives on Sept. 11. Even Clarke said, "if we had stopped those 19 deluded fools who acted on Sept. 11, as we should have done, there would have been more later . . . America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings." But there is no denying that the Bush family spent a decade and a half making Saddam the face of evil while Al Qaeda remained relatively faceless to Americans. Despite genocide going on in other parts of the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first President Bush almost immediately reached for Hitler analogies for Saddam after Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait.
For several days, the senior Bush escalated his rhetoric until the feverish moment when he claimed that Saddam's atrocities were worse than Hitler's. He said Saddam's tactic of putting hostages near military targets was a brutality "that I don't believe Adolf Hitler ever participated in." That was too much for many American Jewish leaders who protested that as brutal as Saddam was, his atrocities did not compare to Hitler's extermination of 6 million Jews. Bush toned down the rhetoric, but his purpose was achieved as many Democrats stood with Republicans in virtually turning Saddam into Hitler's son.
The Hitler comparisons were almost instantly revived in the current Bush administration. Before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department was putting out press releases such as "From Hitler to Hussein: The Need for Ballistic Missile Defense." Rumsfeld repeatedly linked the two, saying in August 2002, "Only after Hitler invaded and occupied France, the Netherlands, Belgium and then attacked England did people think." In September of 2002, before the Senate Armed Services Committee as the administration began making its case to invade Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "Long before the Second World War, Hitler wrote in `Mein Kampf' indicating . . . what he intended to do. But the hope was that maybe he would not do what he said. And between 35 (million) and 65 million people died because of a series of calculated mistakes."
That worked well enough to get a critical number of Democrats, including presumptive presidential nominee John Kerry, to authorize the administration to invade Iraq. Even though the invasion produced neither weapons of mass destruction nor a plot to attack the United States, the administration continues to pound the Saddam-Hitler theme to distract us from how relatively toothless Saddam remained from the first Gulf War.
In January, Wolfowitz said Saddam was "in a class with few others -- Stalin, Hitler, Kim Jong Il."
Even Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has gotten into the act. Last week, after meeting the Iraqi democracy delegation, Veneman said, "as our guests described it to me, this was a regime that was worse than Hitler."
Then there is President Bush. At Fort Campbell last week, he ended a speech to soldiers by referring to World War II when a soldier told General Dwight Eisenhower, "We ain't worried. It's Hitler's turn to worry." Bush continued, "That spirit carried the American soldier across Europe to help liberate a continent. It's the same spirit that carried you across Iraq to set a nation free."
That spirit was necessary in World War II. It may be a fatal distraction today. Trying to link Saddam to Hitler may have carried us right over the real terrorists. The more that former Bush administration officials talk, the more it is possible that the spirits of 3,000 Americans are on Bush's hands.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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