Over at TAP, Justin Logan delivers 20 lashes to the scores of Hitler-invoking hawks who keep demeaning Munich and trivializing Adolph in service of bombing Iran. I sort of think folks miss the point of the Hitler analogies, though: They're not about the danger, but the glory. When Podhoretz compares Ahmadinejad to Hitler, he's doing less to analogize the threats they posed than to underscore how deeply righteous and honorable a war with Iran would be. Everyone wants to lead the next Greatest Generation.
Beyond that, I like Logan's points as to how much weaker today's threats are:
the gap between a Saddam Hussein or an Ali Khamenei and Adolf Hitler is enormous. All of the supposed modern day Hitlers have presided over sclerotic economies and led states with barely a hope of defending themselves, let alone overrunning an entire continent or the world. Hitler, by contrast, existed in an entirely different environment. The military balance in 1930s Europe made it far from irrational for Hitler to think that it may be possible for Nazi Germany to consolidate control over the continent.
As economic historian Mark Harrison has pointed out, "in the years 1935-9 Germany had procured a volume of combat munitions far greater than any other power, and equal in real terms to the munitions production of all her future adversaries combined." Hitler was aggressive, disgusting, and genocidal, but the thinking that led to the attempt to dominate Europe was not entirely irrational. For Iran to make a play at dominating a continent, let alone the globe, the leadership would have to be quite literally insane. Yet no evidence has been offered to support this thesis.
The possibility of nuclear weapons intensely magnifies the destructive potential of these countries, but here is where the Hitler analogy actually is useful: Hitler didn't set out to commit suicide. He set out to win. Iran, who knows they can't defeat America or survive Israelis submarine-based second strike capacities, has no incentive to become aggressive. They can't win, and they know it. Comparing them to a country that thought it could win is a really dumb comparison.
