"It's an open question whether or not Europe may not be right about an Iraq war. Talk of Munich and appeasement accompanied our Vietnam debacle. Whether it really fits Saddam Hussein or not -- whether Saddam really is the new Hitler -- is a question that should at least be debated. Europe's policy is to let sleeping dogs lie, and it views Saddam as a sleeping dog whom it would be more dangerous to arouse than to simply let be. Europeans construct theories of their own about why our government is so determined for war. Gelehrter's view shouldn't be assumed to be more authoritative than opposing views without reference to the actual situation and stakes in the Middle East.
The shadow of Munich was invoked earlier. In Korea, for example, and again, as epitomized by the pre-Vietnam JFK exhortation to "pay any price, bear any burden". That these utterances were made lightly or stupidly doesn't alter the fact that they were right: the Berlin Wall did not collapse accidentally.
But your point is valid. Historical analogies can be twisted to suit. Yet what is the alternative, except to reason from hindsight and existing evidence? The problem with predicting the future is that is hasn't happened yet. Part of the human condition is that we have to go with what we know, in fundamental ignorance of what will befall.
Perhaps the European "take" on September 11 is to let sleeping dogs lie. In John Pilger's memorable phrase: don't fan the flames. But the problem is that the dogs have been abroad a long while, on the Indian subcontinent, in the Middle East, in the Molluccas, in Africa, in the Balkans. September 11 does the disservice of suggesting that a new history began on that day. But the only thing special about September 11 is that it happened in New York. It was business as usual in Karachi transported to Manhattan for a day.
These are not dogs, either, but wolves. And we have long heard their howling on the marches.
Yet this article is implausible on a single point: that the trauma of the First World War created an unwarranted pacifism and caution. The losses, though grievous, were not insupportable. More people died in the influenza following the war. And within 20 years an entire European population with personal memories of the Western front were ready to fight again! Not pacifism: say rather wolf-blindness or perhaps a fondness for the wolves themselves. The Europeans don't hate war so much as they love dictators. They don't mind people dying in the Middle East so long as they are Jews. Spilled blood is fine by them, as long as it is American blood.
It wasn't pacifism, but evil, which crept out of the mud of the trenches and into the continental consciousness in the 1920s. We have given it many names: communism, nihilism, or simply a self-destructive paganism. It remains menacing and potent, the unfought enemy.