The New Defeatism

Explain McG. To me 'defeatism' suggests America isn't up to the whatever it sets its mind to do or that the results will be much different than what is hoped for.

You made a couple of really good points there in those first two paragraphs -- and then there's this blatant hole in the third.

What do you mean "we had no more information about Hitler than we had about Saddam Hussein"? By the time the US joined WW2, Hitler had not just occupied Bohemia and then Poland - he had occupied nearly all of mainland Europe! And was bombing the UK!

The equivalent to that would be to decide to attack Saddam by a time when his armies had already occupied almost all of the Middle East, erstwhile rival great powers included.

Instead, we attacked Iraq at a time when it was weakened and contained by no-fly zones, occupied no foreign country, and when the main victims of the erstwhile attempted genocide, the Kurds, were safe in their autonomous zone.

Back when Iraq was gassing its Kurds, however, the US government refused to vote for an official UN condemnation, the US President vetoed a (Democrat-sponsored) Congress resolution to impose sanctions in retaliation, and instead granted Saddam another billion dollar loan.

Looks to me like you people got it exactly the wrong way round. And considering how you're still defending Bush Sr.'s policies here - hey, it kept Saddam "out of everybody else's hair" - the bit about how "he murdered 300,000 of his own people" evokes the words "crocodile tears", here.

We had no more information about Hitler's intent than we had information about Saddam's intent. The only reason Saddam did not annex Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is we acted more quickly than did the FDR administration and we stopped him in his tracks.

The U.S. policy prior to us entering WW II was one of appeasement. Okay, we'll let Hitler have Belgium and maybe he'll be happy then. Okay, maybe if we let him have Poland he'll be satisfied.

The jury is still out on whether Saddam was weakened. He had ample time to ship a lot of WMD off to Syria or any other willing ally so we aren't sure. The one thing we are sure of is that he had them, he had used them, and everybody in the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, and every other country in the free world believed he had them and would use them again.

Well, quite. And thats where your equation of how the US went to war against Germany and how it now has gone to war against Iraq falls apart. FDR did wait until Germany had actually attacked and occupied other countries. (Imho it could have acted a little sooner, namely after the first country Germany violently occupied - but only then). GWB attacked Iraq on the mere suspicion that Saddam might be considering giving weapons to somebody else who might use them to attack some other country with ...

There's only few times that the world faces an agressive dictatorship going out attacking and occupying other countries. There is no dispute here that a declaration of war is the right response if it does. Hitler's Germany was a case in question. Iraq wasn't. End of parallel.

The other proposed reason to go to war is to prevent an ongoing genocide, like we thought was happening in Kosovo. That would never have flown back in the 40s - by 1942, the governments knew fully well about the death camps, but it still didnt figure on anyone's priority list. In Iraq, the time to intervene then would have been in 1988, when Saddam was gassing the Kurds - and when Bush Sr was shoring him up with millions of dollars. By 2003, the Kurds were all safe in their self-governed entity, and Saddam's Iraq was just another grisly dictatorship. If that is reason enough for war, I have a list of a few dozen other countries to take on next.



There is not a shred of evidence indicating that he actually did. Yes, the jury is also still out on whether aliens landed in my garden last week - I have no evidence, but there's no evidence that they didn't, either, after all.



Demonstrably false. Remember the fierce opposition Powell faced in the UN when he tried to convince us that the US had evidence that Saddam still had WMD? Remember the German Foreign Minister saying,

"The Americans allowed us to build up our democracy, but in this democracy my generation has learnt... ( in English ) You have to make the case, and to make the case in a democracy, you have to be convinced yourself, and excuse me, I am not convinced."?

The very reason some of the main European countries opposed the invasion was that they were not sure we knew forsure Saddam still had WMD. All we knew is that he once had had them, that most of them were destroyed during the weapon inspections regime, and that of a remainder, there was no proof that they were not there anymore. That does not necessarily mean that they were there. Thats the question we wanted to have solved first, through further weapon inspections, before agreeing to some full-scale war and occupation.

Now you may want to apply selective memory on this whole debate because you "believed he had them and would use them again" back then - and you may come with a dozen quotations from American Democrats to underpin that "everyone" thought so - but don't try to put those words into our mouths.

No, it was one of isolationism. The causes of that policy are myriad, but one very important aspect of it was the obstructionism of Republicans and America-Firsters who opposed even half-measures such as Lend-Lease.

Respectfully disagree. I don't recall anybody saying they weren't sure. I recall they didn't want to do a pre-emptive strike with us but wanted to give the inspectors more time.

Well, I just quoted one of them for you ... German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. One of the essential players when it came to the European opposition to the US effort to get a resolution OK'ing war.