The Administration Who Cried “Hitler”

Glenn Greenwald’s got a great post today about the administration’s (and their supporters’) insistence on casting every dime-store despot as Hitler these days. One of the things that drives me bonkers about this shit is that, when someone vaguely rational tries to draw a distinction between a guy like Saddam, for example, and Hitler, s/he is automatically cast as an appeaser, with no regard for important (and really not all that subtle) nuances like scope and the baseline capacity to engage in the sort of large-scale tyranny and destruction exacted by Hitler.

Intent notwithstanding, there’s got to be some kind of regard for the means to realize that intent. The lying scumbags currently running this nation know that, which is why, even though Iraq didn’t have the tools, and neither does Iran, they make all kinds of mendacious claims to attempt to create an illusion to the contrary. No one knows better than they do that—at minimum—the façade of such means is a key component to selling the necessity of a war. It’s so indicative of what opportunistic and dishonest bastards they are that while casting as spineless traitors any dissenters who point out that ability to act on intent is an important consideration in the decision to go to war, they simultaneously trump up the appearance of such ability to bolster their case.

Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are indecent, maniacal fuckwits, but that doesn’t mean they were/are a threat to Americans even if they want(ed) to be. The administration didn’t sell the Iraq war as a humanitarian intervention to protect the people most likely to suffer at the hand of Saddam—his own people—but as a preemptive strike against a nation that both intended and had the ability to harm the American people. Iran is now the same story. And once again, they’re not selling it as a rescue mission on behalf of Iranians (or even Israelis), but as an American national security concern, which is patently false.

Glenn points to this post at The Belgravia Dispatch, in which Gregory Djerejian has utilized the Wayback Machine to dig out the administration’s pre-Iraq war comments and compare them to the current comments being made about Iran, which are “strikingly, and alarmingly, similar.” Glenn notes:

[T]he array of unreliable and misleading statements made with regard to many matters prior to the invasion of Iraq have completely destroyed this government's credibility, making its word automatically subject to serious doubt by any rational person -- including, most destructively, its own citizens, in a way that is almost certainly unprecedented in our nation's history.

The alarmist hyperbole, the disingenuous framing, the manipulation of intelligence and outright lies—it’s not only left the administration lacking credibility, but it’s left the American people less safe. If we can’t trust our leadership to be honest with us, there are a lot of people who will think they’re just crying Hitler again if a genuine and immediate threat presents itself. And even if we’re all clever enough to suss out the reality, our own nation may very well be left without the resources to do what really needs to be done, as our treasure and military have been stretched too thin chasing after illusions.

Fates save us if another real Hitler emerges, because Bush certainly won’t.