Editorial Opinion

Israel, world running out of Munich-style ‘peace’?

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So exact are the strategies and aggressions of today’s maniac dictators, and most Western responses, that they form a perfect template from the pre-World War II 1930s.

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by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal

Has any Democrat Baby Boomer in the U.S. Senate, or Republican Chuck Hagel for that matter, heard why World War II happened and what it finally took to stop two fanatic enemies, Germany and Japan?
You’d think not.
“Vietnam,” meaning the Vietnam War, has so ingrained itself into the thinking of the “Iraq is Vietnam” cadre that one wonders where to begin.
For starters, Iraq is not Vietnam.
It is an early round of World War III, the conflagration that militant Islam put in play by killing 3,000 innocents on Sept. 11, 2001 and which it continues to inflict on democracies through suicide bombers, missile-firing rogue militias within nations and threats from nuclear nations themselves.
It is a war in which the current out-front “Axis Powers” – Saddam’s Iraq, Iran and North Korea – followed and are following the blueprints of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to the letter.
The wording “out front” is mandatory because probably not a living soul outside China’s ruling Politburo knows Chinese long-range ambitions. Will China evolve into a broker for peace among nations that it influences? Or is it giving sway to North Korea’s and Iran’s deranged leaders as willing or unwitting cats paws in a scheme to dominate the United States?
So exact are the strategies and aggressions of today’s maniac dictators, and most Western responses, that they form a perfect template from the pre-War World War II 1930s.
Hitler called for the destruction of the Jews.
Saddam and his Iranian twin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, call for the destruction of Israel.
In his run-up to war, Hitler used terror, threats, bluffs, feints and actual invasions, incredibly coupled with demands for negotiations and peace conferences, all the while perfecting his weapons of war.
Sound familiar in today’s Middle East and North Korea?
(For perspective, see Thomas Sowell’s column on the opposite page, or refer to our Midlands Business Journal Web site, mbj.com, editorial section, for our comments dating to 2004.)
This writer turns to the subject after noting a Saturday headline in the Omaha World-Herald in which Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska calls Iraq a “replay” of Vietnam.
Hagel is a Republican. But he is, in effect, the liberal media’s best friend on Iraq – better than any Democrat – because he goes before the cameras and into the headlines as a onetime Bush supporter, converted towards Howard Dean.
Calling for negotiations with terrorist groups would have had more impact before 17 United Nations’ unanswered resolutions demanding Saddam stop what he was doing. Iran’s Ahmadinejad apparently is already planning to pitch UN resolutions in the trash. Lacking Saddam’s subtleties, he calls for Israel’s obliteration outright. Kim Jong Il seems not to be noticing anything, choosing to fire away with his missiles and build his nuclear stockpile.
Removing Saddam Hussein early, President George W. Bush and Tony Blair did what Winston Churchill could not do with Adolf Hitler, that is, stop his madness before it required destroying most of Europe and millions upon millions of lives on all sides.
The rogue terror states seem inexorably to be dancing the democratic world back into the Thirties, when virtually the entire western leadership dithered while dictators planned their strikes.
“Terror” Adolf Hitler said, “will always succeed unless confronted by a greater terror.”
Hitler, his Nazis and Imperial Japan terrorized, and then it happened. The Free World trumped their terror and imposed a greater terror upon them. And they were no more.

July, 2006

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