Bush Repeating Mistakes of World War Two in Iraq

Our nation's commemoration of Pearl Harbor Day this past week brought to mind our need to honor our World War Two veterans who are slowly fading away and passing on. Neoconservatives who support fighting the war in Iraq today against nameless enemies until hell freezes over and attempt to paint the war as some kind of classic World War Two–style slugmatch between good and evil lack any historical memory. For World War Two was not a clear-cut fight between good and evil as the US under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought side by side with the most genocidal dictator the world had ever seen, Josef Stalin and supported or acquiesced in Soviet aggression including his annexations of parts or the whole of seven eastern European and one Asian country and his occupation and enslavement of many more.

In justifying its invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has attempted from time to time to connect Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. At one point, the administration resorted to releasing an unofficial indictment of Saddam Hussein accusing him of killing 1.5 million Muslims. How the administration came up with this highly inflated number is anyone's guess. A more reasonable estimate is that Saddam Hussein only killed 300,000 Muslims in Iraq, most of whom were Islamist Shiite fanatics such as we find alternatively killing US soldiers and leading the increasingly brutal fundamentalist Islamist Iraqi government today. In fact, Saddam's Iraq did kill hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers in a war fought on behalf of the Reagan administration and the United States aimed at overthrowing the world's first terrorist-supporting Islamist regime in modern history (and the model for Iraq's current leaders) and preventing the spread of Iranian terror and revolution to its secular-led neighbors in the Middle East.

In what has to be considered an unprecedented attempt at justification for a modern war, the Bush administration used Iraq's over two decade-old invasion of the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of its unofficial indictment of Saddam Hussein along with a laundry list of equally dated accusations, many if not most of which long predated even the First Gulf War. It was as if the US invaded Nazi Germany in 1938 in response to Germany's 1914 invasion of France. Its attempt to justify its invasion of Iraq in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks executed by Saudi and Egyptian members of Al Queda was kind of like invading Britain in response to an aggression committed by Germany. The one had nothing to do with the other and moreover were longtime enemies as Bin Laden had volunteered as far back as 1990 to wage a jihad or holy war against Iraq when Saddam invaded Kuwait. In World War Two, Nazi Germany killed nearly 8.7 million Red Army soldiers, which might otherwise have been used to spearhead Stalin's once-planned invasion of Europe which according to Soviet and German sources was planned for fall 1941 or early 1942 at the latest and was codenamed by the Soviets – Operation Groza (Thunderstorm) or might have been used to invade Western Europe after the war had ended.

Apparently discarding the moral principles it claimed to champion in deposing Saddam Hussein from power, the Bush administration is today employing US troops in direct support of a murderous Islamist Shiite regime which tortures its own people using the exact same unbelievably horrendous methods and torture prisons used by Saddam and which employs its Interior Ministry militia forces as death squads to assassinate its Sunni political prisoners. In addition to this, as the Islamist Shiite leaders of Iraq, many of them former terrorists themselves, are closely allied to the Islamic Republic of Iran – our most determined terrorist enemy – it should be obvious to all that the war in Iraq is much less a matter of good versus evil than was World War Two.

The Second World War was a just war, but it was a war that was not always justly fought. Indeed, as my extensive research into the war for the alternate World War Two book series, Empires at War, I am writing has increasingly driven home, it was the most terrible and dreadful war in world history. Considerations of Christian morality and the laws of war protecting innocent civilians from deliberate acts of genocide from terror bombing from the air and concentration camps (both in Germany and Soviet Siberia) were thrown out the window by both sides in their rush to achieve a swift and crushing military victory. Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Leahy, drew attention to this fact when he denounced the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as barbaric, declaring,

"It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan … The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

While the Second World War ended in total military victory for the United States, it was also a very temporary and in many ways Pyrrhic victory as the Soviet Empire seized control of the eastern half of Europe, and most of the old Japanese empire (China, northern Japan, northern Korea and subsequently Indochina). Churchill, who had declared that his lifelong goal was to preserve the British Empire, in deciding to reject Hitler's call for a truce in spring 1940 and continue to fight the war to the bitter end, merely succeeded in guaranteeing the empire's more rapid demise. At the end of the war, the destruction of the Japanese Empire and more especially Germany which had long served to contain aggression from its more murderous and threatening neighbor to the east – the Soviet Union – created a vacuum in power which the evil Soviet empire rushed to fill thus making the world safe for Communism and Communist revolution. Similarly, the Bush administration's destruction of the secular Iraqi state has resulted in a vacuum in power which its more aggressive, terrorist and threatening neighbor to the east – the evil Islamic empire of Iran – has rushed to fill, succeeding in getting its own Islamist proxy revolutionaries elected to lead the Iraqi government earlier this year.

As General Wedemeyer and other great American political and military leaders concluded, the only real victors in World War Two were the Communists. Today we see history repeating itself as the only real victors of our smashing of the secular Iraqi state are the Islamic Republic of Iran (and their terrorist proxies in Iraq which have since been elected to lead the new Islamist Iraqi government), Al Queda and other jihadists. The reason is that we have not only overthrown their longtime enemy, Saddam Hussein; we have enabled them to establish a terrorist haven, base of operations and most disturbingly a training ground for terrorists to spread Islamic revolution throughout the region and perhaps plan and stage future terrorist attacks against the United States homeland.

Without World War Two and our unbelievably massive and unquestionably immoral direct military and military industrial assistance to the Soviet Union (an action frought with so many evil consequences, it caused our great country to lose part of its collective soul I think for generations to come), it is highly questionable that it would have been able to become a nuclear and military superpower as early as it did. As Churchill belatedly admitted in late 1945 in exclaiming "Gentlemen it appears we have killed the wrong pig," the Soviet Union was a much more dangerous and long-lasting enemy than Hitler’s Germany. Likewise, it is clear that the Islamic Republic of Iran could never have become regional hegemon of the Persian Gulf (reportedly only a few months away from developing nuclear weapons for its medium-range ballistic missiles) so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq to check the spread of Iranian terror and revolution to its neighbors.

The Soviet Union certainly could not have become a superpower without FDR and Churchill's shameful appeasement of Stalin (who was by far the greatest mass murderer in history at the time) at Yalta where they sold over 200 million human beings into Communist slavery and genocide (among other related war crimes they committed like Operation Keelhaul in which they forcibly returned 2–6 million anti-Communist resistance fighters and their families to the Soviet Union to be slaughtered). FDR and Churchill were perhaps the greatest appeasers in world history, a fact which has been largely whitewashed from the historical record by liberal and generally Soviet apologist historians of the immediate post-war period as well as FDR and Churchill's liberal and neoconservative apologists today even though several excellent traditional conservative authors in the 1940's and 1950's pointed this out. The comparisons between President Bush and the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the neocons are so fond of making are much more unflattering than they would care to admit as the Bush administration continues to appease rogue state leaders in China, North Korea, Sudan, Iran and now Iraq.

Immediately following the war, life in Germany became apocalyptic as over a million more Germans (and Romanians) were made slave laborers with FDR and Churchill's support, while the Red Army proceeded to rape hundreds of thousands of German women and the vast majority of the 3.5 million captured German army soldiers at the very end of the war were marched back into Soviet Russia to Siberian gulags never to return. Meanwhile in western Germany, the Western Allies began implementing the genocidal Morganthau plan, the brainchild of Soviet agent and then-Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White supported by Churchill, which called for the forced deindustrialization of Germany leading to the planned deaths of tens of millions of Germans by starvation until President Harry Truman decided to scrap it in what is unquestionably the most enlightened decision of his entire Presidency. The US invasion and more especially its seemingly never-ending occupation of Iraq, has brought unprecedented violence and Islamist fanatic extremism and terrorism to that hapless country as those the administration has described as terrorists engage in 500–700 attacks on US forces and civilian targets each and every week. Much as the Allied destruction of Germany and Japan in 1945 had the undesired result of making the Soviet Union the undisputed hegemon of the Eurasian supercontinent, the US destruction of Baathist Iraq in 2003 has served to expand Iran's Islamic Empire westward, which has caused increasing alarm in Israel.

December 26, 2005