Dangerous restraint
President George W.
Bush's speech on Iraq in effect reiterated what Edmund Burke said more
than two centuries ago: "There is no safety for honest men except by
believing all possible evil of evil men." Today, in a nuclear age,
those words apply more strongly than ever.
To many Americans, it was almost incomprehensible how men could
fly airplanes into crowded office buildings, to their own certain
destruction and the slaughter of thousands of innocent people. But they
did. Now, it is equally incomprehensible to many Americans how a two-bit
dictator, thousands of miles away, would dare to pose a nuclear threat to
the United States.
If the September 11th attacks did not demonstrate how far hate-filled men
will go, then more than a decade of Saddam Hussein's innumerable
violations of the agreements that ended the Gulf War should give us a
clue. He has provided more of the "proof" that President Bush's
critics demand than anyone could possibly supply, short of a mushroom
cloud over some American city.
What Saddam Hussein is doing is nothing new. Hitler played all these
kinds of games during the 1930s, while he was building up his military
forces until he reached the point when he was ready to strike. He
understood that he needed to buy time above all and that, when he became
powerful enough, many would see the futility of resistance.
The same kinds of people in the West who refused to see the crucial
importance of time in the 1930s are today saying that we should
"wait until" this or that happens before we take military
action "as a last resort."
Military action is already a last resort. Where have these people been
during the past 11 years, while Saddam Hussein played cat and mouse with
the United Nations and their inspectors, who were allowed
"unfettered" access until Saddam Hussein decided otherwise?
Maybe it would be useful to see how this game was played by Hitler, in
order to understand why time is crucial.
Germany's ability to attack other nations in Europe was stifled by a
treaty which required them to station no troops in their own industrial
center in the Rhineland. This meant that, if Germany attacked any other
country, French troops could easily seize German industry and paralyze
its economy.
Because the French army was then much larger than Germany's, since the
German army's size was limited by treaty, the threat of aggression from
Hitler was thwarted, so long as he lived up to these treaties. Otherwise,
as the potentially strongest nation on the continent, Nazi Germany was a
threat to all its neighbors.
After Hitler took the desperate gamble in 1936 of sending troops into the
Rhineland, in violation of this treaty, he remarked privately, "If
the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to
withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at
our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate
resistance."
Moreover, Hitler understood that such a fiasco would have brought down
the Nazi regime. He took this huge gamble precisely because he was
convinced that the French did not have the guts to act. Neither did
Britain -- especially after Hitler appealed to the wishful thinkers by
offering a 25-year non-aggression pact.
Those who deal with the gritty life and death choices of the real world
as if they were discussing abstract questions around a seminar table said
that Hitler had "just gone into his own backyard." Other
nations station their troops anywhere they want, inside their own
borders, why not Germany?
By the time they realized why not, Hitler had devastated half the
continent and had come within a hair of destroying Britain.
At the end of World War II, Winston Churchill said that never was there a
war that would have been easier to prevent. The earlier that preventive
action would have been taken against Hitler, the lower the cost would
have been. But history, he added, showed "how counsels of prudence
and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger."
Caution is sometimes the most dangerous policy. And this looks like one
of those times today.
_______________________
Scott MacLean
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ICQ: 9184011
http://www.nerosoft.com
