[schwenkler]

Paglia states: >>"There's just no way that Saddam's threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War II. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don't need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations."<<

Paglia (whom I hold in the highest regard) is using hindsight to distinguish the justification for World War II and the prospective Gulf War II. What’s really more to the point is the reigning perception on the part of the incipient Allies at the time:

On what basis did France and Britain declare war on Germany in 1939? Did they think he was bent on *world* domination? Or that his military machine was *really* so massive? No. Realistically, they exasperatedly declared war after the failure of the Munich Pact to stem Hitler’s pan-Germanic turf-gobbling. They went to war to stem what was perceived as REGIONAL aggression into the east of Europe. They went to war with the knowledge that France had the largest and (so they believed) finest army in Europe and the Maginot Line to hide behind. They did not appreciate the revolution that Blitzkrieg represented until the Allied military was ablated in 1940.

Hitler wanted to re-add Poland (and then, ultimately, Russia—but that was unknown outside of Berlin) to the Reich. Western Europe and “the world” were never really on the agenda until the world took him (and the Axis) on. By all perceptions he was settling old scores in the east and undoing some of what France and Britain had done a Versailles. Once the Allies chose (rightly) to expand the war and Hitler foolishly declared war on the U.S. to garner Japanese intervention in Siberia, it became an all or nothing enterprise and all the stops came out. Rhetoric aside, the world understood in 1939 that they were waging what they *hoped* would be a quickly successful war that was necessary to stop Hitler from retaining his ill-gotten gains in the east and to honor, albeit only symbolically, their assurances to Poland that they would not be wiped off the map again a’la Frederick the Great.

The retrospective makes the war decision of September 1939 into something more absolute than it was. It was a complicated matter, but it was felt, after the diplomatic failure, that there was no other viable choice. Our current concern is also complicated and, if Paglia has one theme herein, it is that we must avoid the recent tendency to over-simplify this decision. She is right. However, while we do not share a boarder with Iraq as France did in 1939, our diplomacy has been made just as irrelevant as the Munich accord was by September ’39 and, I would suggest, our ‘viable choices’ have been likewise reduced.