I Think Wizbang Has This All Wrong
Jay Tea at Wizbang Blog has posted one of those “history repeats itself” articles in An uncomfortable parallel - Wizbang
I fail to see this part of his parallelism. I’m not against looking for historical precedent, so to speak, for what’s happening now. What I object to is the characterization of Nazi Germany as a reluctant enemy of the US. They may have feared engaging us, but they were perfectly comfortable in attacking US interests and allies across Europe.In short, what we’re seeing are more and more acts of war, moving from the sub rosa to the flagrant and into the world of the indisputable and unavoidable. It reminds me of the relationship between the United States and Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.
And what I don’t like about it is that in this case, Iran is the United States — and we are Nazi Germany.
The US isn’t looking to take over Iran, or even Iraq for that matter. We’re trying to clean out the political landscape there to reduce the number of places where Islamo-fascist terrorists can hide, train, recuperate, and regroup.
If there is a parallel, and I think there can be to a slight degree only, it is between Great Britain prior to the war and the US now. We are carefully looking everywhere but at the source of most of the trouble in the Middle East/Southwest Asia region. We have even found our own Neville Chamberlain - we just had to find a larger collection of them in the Baker-Hamilton commission.
We are, after all, a much greater super power than Great Britain was in 1939.
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Yes, Germany was going after our “allies” (although we were officially neutral, and had no “allies” per se) and our interests, but they were bending over backwards to push things to the point where open war would be declared. That was the parallel I was pushing — prior to World War II, we stretched and distorted and perverted our “neutrality” to do everything we could for England (and, to a lesser degree, the Soviet Union) and oppose Germany — much like Iran is doing today. And we, like Germany, are studiously ignoring repeated violations of neutrality and acts of war, because we aren’t prepared to actually wage that war.
The parallels don’t bother me too much, because I can understand the rationales behind both positions. It’s that I’m identifying our current actions with those of Nazi Germany’s — even though it was the only sensible choice — that makes me uncomfortable.
J.
Comment by Jay Tea — December 28, 2006 @ 8:10 am