Saddam Hussein may turn into another Hitler

Published Friday, November 27, 1998, in the Miami Herald

RICHARD N. WINFIELD

Saddam Hussein may turn into another Hitler

Richard N. Winfield is a media lawyer in New York City. He taught European history and American diplomatic history at the U.S. Naval Academy.

THERE was an earlier time when the West's political leaders faced another implacable and dangerous adversary who was bent on destruction. It was the 1930s, and pacifism and appeasement were in the air in the West. Confronted with Adolf Hitler's appetite for territory and power, the West's political leaders made fateful error after fateful error. Each accommodation to Hitler, each retreat, invariably was accompanied by strong words and postures by politicians such as British Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier.

Almost alone among his contemporaries, Winston Churchill, then out of office, saw their folly and the evils that would follow. In words that have a chilling resonance today, in 1936 he captured perfectly their fatuousness, weakness, and hypocrisy: ``So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.''
When the bill for their folly finally came to be paid between 1939 and 1945, it was monstrous.

History has not forgiven, and ought not forgive, the West's politicians, some Americans included, whose lack of will, constancy, and courage all but assured the terrible consequences that followed. Even at that, Hitler did not possess the Bomb nor the modern means of waging chemical and biological warfare.

Saddam Hussein, however, possesses both the technology and the will to make the casualties of 1939 to 1945 seem puny. The West needs no more convincing that Iraq's threat to regional and world peace is palpable.

Led by the United States, however, the West responds with the now-familiar pattern of gestures of bluster and saber-rattling, followed by stand-downs and accommodations. Iraq, meanwhile, continues to develop, or at least hide, its weapons of mass destruction.

Rudderless and poll-driven, the Clinton administration and its supporters in strange paradox maintain a brave front full of sound and fury. Like their predecessors of the 1930s, they mask their indecision, irresolution, drift, fluidity, and impotence with tentative displays of firepower.

The time will come when the bill for this present folly will be presented for payment. History will not be kind to this administration or the West's political leaders.

If there are any historians.