"If you live in the United States and want to start a war," Justin Logan writes, "the first step is to compare the foreign leader to Adolf Hitler."
This technique was on display in a recent PBS NewsHour debate between Norman Podhoretz, a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International. At least four times during the debate, Podhoretz likened the clerical regime in Tehran to the Nazis. He argued that there is a danger that Iran may "replace [the existing global order] with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."This is a ridiculous claim, and it exalts Iran to status it does not deserve. Podhoretz and his confreres have a sad and curious track record of crying wolf, seeing Hitlers and appeasement nearly everywhere. The danger of embracing the Munich analogy as a catch-all analytical tool for international politics is that it overstates the implications of each international conflict, and demeans the importance -- and uniqueness -- of the threat posed by Hitler. By invoking the Hitler analogy over and over, American leaders and intellectuals put us on a path to war, in many cases where we need not be, and risk numbing the American people to the since-unrivaled consolidation of power and evil under the Nazi party in Germany.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
