IV - Historians Against the War
The Munich Analogy and the Persian Gulf War
“If at First...” cartoon by Jeff Hook, August 1990
Sara Dougherty
Department of History
University of Rochester
January 23, 2005
The Munich Analogy and the Persian Gulf War Sara Dougherty
In October 1938, representatives of France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy met at Munich in Bavaria to address German demands. Hitler had signaled his expansionist intent by re-arming Germany, by occupying the demilitarized Rhineland, and by engineering the Anschluss of Germany and Austria in March. Gripped by fear of military confrontation and politically inhibited by their pacifist populaces, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s premier Daladier accepted assurances that the Sudetenland was Hitler’s “last territorial demand in Europe,” and signed away Czechoslovakia’s western defenses. Chamberlain’s “Peace with honor, peace for our time” was a delusion. Hitler, appeased, proceeded to occupy all Czechoslovakia, then invaded Poland, plunging Europe into war within a year.
The Munich Conference has become a byword and a symbol, not only of a fatal miscalculation, but of national weakness, of spineless “appeasement” of an implacable, expansionist enemy. The “lesson of Munich” is that the military price of stopping aggression was cheaper in 1938 than in 1939 or 1941, and that the strongest possible confrontation therefore is called for in analogous cases. Failure to intervene to protect some target of aggression is to choose, in Churchill’s words, “both dishonor and war.”
The “lesson” of Munich played a prominent role in American interventionist rationales during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The historical analogy—in which Saddam Hussein was equated with Hitler—came readily to hand for President Bush after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and was applied to the Gulf situation with little serious opposition. Two factors account for this. The first factor is the legacy of the Cold War, during which the Munich analogy figured prominently in American foreign-policy decisions for military intervention and in the public rationales for them. Another factor was the manner in which various American neoconservative and pro-Israel polemicists equated Arab and other Islamic leaders with Hitler, and equated Islamic culture with Nazism. The cultural permeation of the Munich analogy via Cold War political rhetoric would have been sufficient to provide U.S. leaders and the public with an acceptable war rationale during the Persian Gulf crisis, despite the anti-interventionist legacy of the Vietnam War. The Cold War background of the Munich analogy explains why the analogy was available to both Bush and the neoconservatives, but it held different meanings for George Bush and the neoconservatives.
Another conclusion that emerges from the 1990-1991 American “debates” over intervention in the Persian Gulf is that the Munich analogy, in its peculiar American permutation, had become so culturally embedded by the end of the Gulf War that it functioned at all levels of society in a non-rational way—as a preemptive moral syllogism that put an end to, rather than invited analysis or argument, and which mandated a single response on pain of loss of moral and political legitimacy.
The Munich Analogy and the Cold War
During the Cold War, the Munich analogy informed the foreign policy decisions of American presidents and their advisers. President Truman applied its lessons to the Near East crisis of 1947, and the Truman Doctrine emerged from the parallel drawn between the implacable expansionism of Nazi Germany and expansionist Soviet communism. Truman offered this public rationale for the Korean intervention in 1950: “The free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930’s. That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war.” [1] Fascist aggression and Communist aggression were essentially the same, with the same aims. The “domino theory” explicated by Eisenhower in 1954, which became American leaders’ guiding Cold War assumption, took Munich’s aftermath as its model of the inevitable outcome of appeased aggression: if one communist target state fell, others would follow. Lyndon \Johnson, who sought the guidance of history as earnestly as Truman but applied its lessons even more dogmatically, understood that “the central lesson of our time is that the appetite of the aggressor is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next.”[2] When Johnson decided in 1965 to Americanize the war in Vietnam, he based the decision on his understanding of Munich: “…everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression...and so would begin World War III.” [3]
For American politicians, the Munich analogy was both a decision-making paradigm and a bludgeon to attack political opponents. As early as 1940, Franklin Roosevelt implicitly referred to Munich when he warned that Republican isolationism partook of “defeatism or appeasement.”[4] Republicans attacked Truman in 1949 and 1950 for having “appeased” communism in Asia. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower reiterated that the Truman administration’s “appalling failure” to learn the lessons of the 1930s had led to the loss of China and the Korean War.[5] Campaigning for Goldwater in 1964, Ronald Reagan warned of “the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation [with the Soviet Union] is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender.” [6] In 1972, Vice President Agnew said of the Democratic presidential candidate, “Even Neville Chamberlain did not carry a beggar’s cup to Munich—as George McGovern proposes to carry to Hanoi.”[7] Campaigning in 1980, Ronald Reagan characterized President Carter’s arms control policy as appeasement: “I believe we are seeing the same situation as when Mr. Chamberlain was tapping the cobblestones of Munich.” These examples must suffice. A comprehensive list of instances of political “Muniching” during the Cold War would run to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages. [8]
The Korean and Vietnam wars were wars of choice, in which Truman and Johnson perceived little risk of bringing on world war or nuclear engagement as a result of intervention, while also perceiving that non-intervention exposed them to serious political risks at home. In these cases, the Munich analogy figured in their decisions and public war rationales. In other foreign-policy crises, in which U.S. leaders perceived a greater risk of war with the Soviets or Red China (Eisenhower during the Hungarian uprising or the Suez crisis, for example), they avoided invoking Munich. Not all cases involving aggression against a weaker third party raised the specter of Munich in presidents’ rhetoric, and the question inevitably arises as to whether the analogy was invoked in some cases and not others because it legitimized interventions presidents wanted to make, rather than because the historical parallels between the cases were so compelling.
Among the scholars who have studied the role of historical analogies in U.S. foreign policy decisions, Ernest L. May argued in 1973 that framers of foreign policy are often influenced by what history teaches, but that they are likely to misapply its lessons.[9] In 1982, Göran Rystad postulated a “Munich Syndrome”—a paradigmatic master narrative that organized all the world’s conflicts into a rigid schema of bipolar confrontation. American cold war leaders, Rystad suggests, were virtually trapped by this syndrome, and the very narrow set of policy options it prescribed. Yuen Foong Khong’s 1992 study contended with the revisionist idea that historical analogies were merely post-hoc justifications for leaders’ predetermined policy choices. Khong argued that analogies did influence such choices and their content, while conceding that the invocation of the 1938 Munich Conference in political rhetoric had a “ritualistic” aspect.[10] Andrew J. Taylor and John T. Rourke, in a 1995 study of the role of historical analogies in Congressional foreign policy choices, found that ideology and partisanship determined such decisions, and that historical analogies were indeed mainly utilized as after-the-fact rationales.[11]
Most recently, Jeffrey Record has argued that Munich and Vietnam, the two most-employed historical analogies of recent years, were polar counterparts that pulled policymakers in opposite directions. Examining the role of analogies in decision-making, and the deployment of analogies as public rationales, Record found that U.S. leaders have often drawn false parallels and misapplied both analogies.[12] Neither Record nor the other scholars noted above address adequately the depth to which presidential decisions to employ military force are always mired in the muck of domestic politics. Plausibly, the Munich analogy came initially into the minds of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson as a framework for understanding the communist enemy they faced. At the same time, Munich also hung over their heads like a sword of Damocles, a rhetorical bludgeon that they knew would be used against them by political opponents should they reject the use of force in particular cases.
Without suggesting that U.S. leaders’ use of the Munich analogy was ever entirely a post-hoc rationale for justifying decisions arrived at by different calculations, one can nonetheless discern that leaders who invoked Munich in one situation, as Eisenhower did to denigrate Truman’s China policy in 1950, adopted courses in other situations, which constituted ‘appeasement” by their own standards, e.g. the decision not to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Moreover, foreign policy decisions from the time of Truman on have been made in the full knowledge of the grievous political costs of inheriting the Chamberlain mantle. Discussion of the Munich analogy or any historical analogy’s influence on a leader’s decisions is hardly separable from a discussion of the use of historical memory and analogy to construct political legitimacy and frame partisan policy debates in terms advantageous to the analogist. A subject little discussed by scholars (although Rystad’s description of a “syndrome” is suggestive) is the extent of the cultural embeddedness of the Munich analogy itself, and the combination of “thick” cultural significance and thin historical content it has acquired through its repeated invocation in successive crises. Through decades of service in the political arena, the Munich analogy has become a cultural resource charged with moral significance but nearly devoid of real historical content or context. It is rather a moral syllogism that expresses absolute values. Because of the absoluteness of the values it embodies, it has come to figure in political discussion as a preemptive argument—a knockout punch that puts an end to, rather than invites, further debate.
Andrew J. Taylor and John T. Rourke may be correct in stating that party ideology influences policy more than historical analogies do, but what has not been discussed is the absorption of this particular historical analogy into an ideology or better, a civil religion. Through its years of Cold War service as a master narrative and a political bludgeon, the Munich analogy has become a tenet, or dogma, of Wilsonian interventionist civil religion. As a moral syllogism applied to “parallel” foreign policy crises, it postulates a predetermined outcome, and dictates an imperative course of action.
The Munich Analogy and the Neoconservatives
The specter of Neville Chamberlain faded from American politics for a brief period after the Vietnam War ended. But by the late 1970s, the Munich analogy was back in fashion. Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism demanded a more confrontational Soviet policy and a stronger defense posture. To Reagan, President Carter’s foreign policy evoked “the tapping of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella on the cobblestones of Munich.” Reagan wove warnings of a new Munich skillfully into his 1980 campaign rhetoric, and continued to invoke Munich against political opponents during his first term. In a 1983 address before the National Association of Evangelicals (Reagan’s “evil empire” speech), the President warned that “if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.”[13] Reagan also likened the advocates of nuclear disarmament to Neville Chamberlain.[14] During his second term, after the revelations of the Iran-Contra affair and during Reagan’s unprecedented rapprochement with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan invoked Munich much less often. While campaigning for George H. W. Bush in 1988, however, he revived the old refrain, citing the “naive appeasement” that had led to World War II. “The sad lesson is that to be weak is to invite war, and George Bush and I will not rest until freedom is restored to all the peoples of Eastern Europe.”[15]
The Munich analogy was hardly Ronald Reagan’s private property during these years. All hard-line anticommunists and defense hawks invoked Munich upon occasion. In 1985, for instance, the College Republicans distributed Neville Chamberlain-style black umbrellas to eight Republican senators who voted against the MX missile.[16] The Munich analogy was invoked with an especial urgency, however, by one group of anticommunist Americans in particular—those known as “neoconservatives.” The neoconservatives’ affinity for this analogy, and for references to the Second World War and the Holocaust, stemmed primarily from the circumstance that many, although not all, were Jewish Americans. The neoconservatives, as John Ehrman observes, began as anti-communist liberal intellectuals in the postwar era (although some of neoconservatism’s leading lights were former Trotskyites in the 1930s and 40s).[17] The neoconservatives-to-be, members of the “liberal consensus” of the 1950s and early 60s, became part of the fallout of the dissolution of consensus in the late 1960s. Rather than turning to the left or becoming isolationist as many liberal Democrats did, these intellectuals were alienated by the 1960s’ counterculture, by détente and post-Vietnam isolationism. In the 1970s, neoconservatives promoted a new tough-minded pragmatism in domestic affairs and a newly-forged brand of anticommunism unscathed by America’s debâcle in Vietnam—an ideological vision of a righteous America wielding its power to advance the cause of democracy. The central neoconservative foreign policy idea in the 1970s and 1980s was that America’s main enemy constituted an absolute threat—and that America’s sole criterion in choosing allies should be whether a regime was anticommunist or not.[18]
Neoconservatives disseminated their ideology from an institutional base that included several conservative think tanks and a growing number of press outlets comprising the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, and Commentary magazine, edited for many years by Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz and the other neoconservatives shared a preoccupation, amounting very nearly to an obsession, with the nightmare of the 1930s and the fear that an unopposed totalitarian enemy would again embark on its Juggernaut march, rolling back democracy in its path. In 1977, Bayard Rustin and Carl Gershman, writing in Commentary, called the U.S. failure to counter the Soviets in Angola the clearest demonstration “since Munich [of] the impotence of the democratic world in the face of totalitarian aggression.”[19] In 1980, Podhoretz summed up the neoconservative sense of a dangerous decline of American power in “The Culture of Appeasement,” which appeared in The Present Danger. Liberals, its author argued, refused to defend, and were incapable of defending, the democratic system that sustained them. A new nationalism, a revived sense of American mission was needed, otherwise, the “unimpeded culture of appeasement” would drive the United States into Soviet vassalage.[20]
A different threat also evoked images of Munich among neoconservatives—Arab hostility towards Israel. “The memory of the 1930s,” evoked by fears of American decline, “was especially disturbing for the neoconservatives because so many of them were Jewish,” John Ehrman observed; “…they feared, as a result of renewed American weakness in the 1970s, the destruction of Israel and a repetition of the Holocaust.” Ehrman noted that Podhoretz, for example, “worried that the United States would try to appease the Arabs and the Third World by forcing Israel to trade land for empty promises of peace.” [21] American neoconservative rhetoric directed at the Palestinian Liberation Organization, replete with allusions to Nazidom, echoed that of Israel’s Likud Party leaders.[22] If, as Peter Novick argued in The Holocaust in American Life, Menachem Begin and his supporters so overworked the Arab-Nazi equation during the Israeli-Lebanon war as to “discredit it,” this fact apparently escaped the American neoconservatives.[23] Norman Podhoretz, for example, accused those Jews who criticized the Lebanon invasion with “granting Hitler a posthumous victory.” [24] Any threatening Arab leader might be a Hitler. In 1984 U.S News & World Report announced that “Qadhafi is the Hitler of the 1980s.”[25]
Neoconservatives supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, and a number served in his administration. They had established a pattern of using the Munich analogy on behalf of politicians and parties of whom they approved, and then wielding Munich as a bludgeon against the same leaders for perceived weakness in foreign policy. By 1983, Reagan incurred neoconservatives’ displeasure despite his unprecedented peacetime military buildup and defense spending. Finding Reagan still too conciliatory towards the Soviets, Podhoretz compared him to Neville Chamberlain, asserting that “appeasement by any other name smells as rank, and the stench of it now pervades the American political atmosphere.”[26] As the Cold War wound down, neoconservatives continued to excoriate signs of “appeasement” towards Mikhail Gorbachev, maintaining that glasnost and perestroika were shams behind which a still-hostile Soviet Union waxed stronger and more implacable while the United States foolishly dropped its guard.
In the midst of these claims, the Soviet empire collapsed, and the Cold War with it, and neoconservatives faced the task of adapting their ideology to a post-cold war world. “Realists”—
foreign policy experts guided by pragmatism and balance-of-power ideas, dominated the George H. W. Bush administration in the persons of advisers Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, and Bush himself. The neoconservative defense intellectuals who had influenced policy during the Reagan years reverted to the position of outsiders again, but dominated a number of major conservative foundations, and had media access through growing list of journals, which now included the newly-founded National Interest, the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. As the Soviet threat declined, the Arab and Islamic threat in the Middle East, always important to both Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives, rose in importance. This threat formed the basis of a new world outlook that required very little change to the old ideology of using American power to confront the encroachment of monolithic and absolute evil.[27]
Early in 1990, amid the collapse of Eastern Europe’s communist regimes, Lithuania asserted its independence from the Soviet Union. President Bush declined to intervene or to recognize the Baltic state. As the Kremlin sent troops to the Lithuanian border that April, President Vytautas Landsbergis accused the United States of selling out the Lithuanian republic, declaring, “This is another Munich.” Deeply involved in negotiations with Gorbachev over trade and the entry of a united Germany into NATO, Bush had incentives not to begin regarding the leader, upon whose nation he was considering granting “most favored” status, as a Hitler, nor to fancy himself clad in the striped pants of Chamberlain, at the behest of one of the favored partner’s smaller satellites.[28] Bush’s decision was soon buried under the dogpile of ensuing events, and few Americans have paid much regard to it, or to the circumstance that the Munich analogy, so resonant in the Cold War context for so many decades, found at that time no echo chamber among the American public. William Safire, in his column of 30 March 1990, did note that the “umbrellas of appeasement” were “unfurling,” from “the Baltics to Baghdad,” but he devoted more column space, and far more rancor, to Baghdad than to the Baltics.[29]
Indeed, for the previous eighteen months, Safire, along with neoconservative editorialists A.M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton B. Zuckerman had been excoriating Bush and Secretary of State James Baker in the opinion pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and U.S. News and World Report for appeasing the Iraq menace. Saddam Hussein had emerged the victor (though rather a Pyrrhic one) from an eight-year war with Iran. Iraq had sustained severe war damage, an $80 billion war debt loomed, and the price of oil, on which Iraq’s entire national economy depended, had dropped significantly, wreaking havoc upon the nation’s finances. In the spring of 1990, Saddam had indeed begun to evince a very threatening posture towards the West, the United States and Israel, and he appeared to be making a bid for leadership of the Arab world by denouncing American influence in the Gulf and threatening Israel.
The pundits believed that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and was only four years away from acquiring one. He had shown himself willing to use WMDs by gassing 5,000 Iraqi Kurds. The neoconservative pundits wanted Saddam Hussein forcibly contained in the most stringent Cold War manner. They equated Hussein with Hitler. Hussein wanted “to wipe out the Jews of Israel and rule the Middle East. He has made this as clear as Mein Kampf…” [30] Instead of containing Hussein, however, Bush appeased. Munich figured as a leitmotif in these columns, through which James Baker, in particular, slunk, figuratively attired in the striped trousers of appeasement and furling and unfurling the black umbrella of dishonor.
The neoconservatives’ warning drumbeat grew louder in July as a new crisis unfolded. On 15 July 1990, Saddam Hussein moved Republican Guards to the Iraq-Kuwait border. The next day, his foreign minister set Iraq’s demands on Kuwait before the Arab League. This latest “thuggery,” wrote Charles Krauthammer in the Times, “finally jolted the Bush administration out of its policy of craven appeasement of Iraq.” [31] Nevertheless, after Saddam assured the Egyptian president and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq that he would not invade Kuwait, Bush’s envoy assured Saddam that America had no intention of intervening in “Arab disputes.” [32] Thus did the Bush administration succeed in recreating “a nightmare out of the nineteen-thirties”:
Hitler analogies are not to be used lightly. To be compared to Hitler is too high a compliment in evil to pay to most tyrants. The time has come, however, to bestow the compliment on a tyrant who is truly a nightmare out of the 1930s: Saddam Hussein, president (soon for life) of Iraq…What raises Hussein to the Hitlerian level is not just his unconventional technique—violence—for regulating prices. Nor is it merely his penchant for domestic brutality—the wholesale murder of political opponents, the poison gas attacks on his own Kurdish minority, the Republic of Fear... that he has constructed.
What makes him truly Hitlerian is his way of dealing with neighboring states. In a chilling echo of the ‘30s, Iraq, a regional superpower, accuses a powerless neighbor of a “deliberate policy of aggression against Iraq,” precisely the kind of absurd accusation Hitler lodged against helpless Czechoslovakia and Poland as a prelude to their dismemberment.[33]
So impressed with Charles Krauthammer’s analysis was Congressman Tom Lantos of California, that he had the editorial read into the Congressional record on 27 July.[34]
George H. W. Bush and the “Media Saturation Phase” of the Gulf Crisis
On 2 August, Saddam’s tanks rolled. Tens of thousands of Iraqi guardsmen crossed the
Kuwait border, occupying the small country in a single day. “For at least a year before Saddam Hussein’s attack across the Kuwaiti border,” as William Safire observed, critics of Safire’s
persuasion had “had little luck establishing” the Munich analogy vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein:
Subversive sobriquets like “the Butcher of Baghdad” and “the hero of Halabja” (a reference to Saddam’s use of poison gas against Kurdish civilians of Halabja, Iraq, killing at least 5,000) did not persuade policy makers or the American public that a new Hitler was in the making….However, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the threat to U.S. oil supplies, President Bush took an interest in the Munich analogy.[35]
The Munich analogy had long been a prominent rhetorical and ideological feature of Cold War discourse, and, among neoconservatives, of Middle Eastern analysis. The Kuwait invasion brought it into the foreground of American popular mythology.
George Herbert Walker Bush was, as Jeffrey Record notes, “the last president for whom Munich and World War II were the dominant foreign policy referent experiences.” [36] For George Bush’s generation, George Will observed, war was the formative experience, and the word “Munich” was “freighted with warning.” [37] Bush was a cautious leader, however. To the former diplomat and CIA head, the virtues of prudence and deniability went hand-in-hand. Bush preferred, and had a history of seeking to attain goals by personal negotiation backed by undercover operations. As president, he had intervened in Panama, but had abstained from taking strong stands on Lithuania or Tiananmen Square. He was not at all anxious to commit himself to restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty at the outset of the Gulf crisis.
Bush met with the National Security Council the morning after the invasion story broke. According to vice president Dan Quayle, this meeting, held at 8:00 AM, “seemed routine.” “We’re not discussing intervention,” the President told some reporters dismissively. When Bush and his security team got down to business, according to Quayle, “there wasn’t an overpowering atmosphere of crisis”:
...In terms of punishing Saddam, the only measure really discussed was economic sanctions that would keep his own oil (and the oil he had captured in Kuwait) off the world markets. The President did not underestimate the seriousness of the situation, and he did say aggression could not be tolerated, but there was no sudden brainstorming about how we could achieve the military liberation of Kuwait—or any agreement that that was our military objective…The real catastrophe everyone feared was an invasion of Saudi Arabia by Iraq, and that’s what our military planning was concerned with on that first day.[38]
The President received cautious advice. General Colin Powell, his chief military adviser, suggested “a line in the sand” be drawn. By this expression, Powell originally meant that the U.S. could accept the takeover of Kuwait, but would stand for no encroachment on Saudi Arabia, a position with which Bush concurred.[39] From this meeting of 2 August issued the president’s first public statement about the Iraqi invasion.[40] President Bush condemned the invasion as “naked aggression,” but avowed that the United States had no plan to intervene militarily.[41]
Later that same day, Bush met Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Aspen for a conference, and the two leaders discussed the Iraq problem. Mrs. Thatcher is supposed, famously, to have “stiffened Bush’s spine” and encouraged him to take a tough stance, by saying, “Now, George, don’t go all wobbly.” [42] The two leaders jointly condemned the invasion, but limited themselves to asking for the imposition of economic sanctions against the Baghdad regime under the United Nations Charter.
On Capitol Hill, Axis allusions mingled with partisan potshots from the first day of the
invasion. Senator Claiborne Pell, Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was probably the first American politician to characterize Saddam Hussein as “the Hitler of the Middle East” after the invasion. Democrats blamed the president for not ordering sanctions earlier. To Republicans, Iraq’s aggression showed that Democrats should “think twice about slashing defense.” House minority whip Newt Gingrich called the invasion the “act of a man who is at least as deranged as Hitler or Mussolini,” and warned the House that weakness only invited war.[43]
Until the invasion of Kuwait, Americans had little knowledge of Iraq or its dictator. Other Middle Eastern affairs—the Tehran hostages, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Reagan’s abortive intervention in Lebanon’s civil war, the deaths of 242 Marines in Beirut, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi—had dominated the news in the 1980s. The rise of Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran had barely registered with Americans, and the invasion of 2 August uncovered a narrative and personality vacuum, which was quickly filled by a convenient set of images and analogies. The equation that neoconservative pundits had hammered to little avail in the preceding eighteen months found its media echo chamber at last. From the first week of the Gulf crisis, American news coverage and editorial opinion began to juxtapose Hussein and Hitler. Rather than clear analysis of Saddam Hussein’s quarrel with Kuwait and Iraq’s relationship with the West, “mythological references to Hitler and Nazi Germany dominated the news.” [44]
Before President Bush made the Munich analogy his own, the steady reiteration of the Saddam-Hitler equation and monitory sketches of 1930s Germany became routine among the journalistic “punditocracy.” [45] During the week after the invasion, the neoconservative
columnists led the press in giving the president a thorough drubbing as a Chamberlainesque appeaser whose spineless policies had invited aggression. Charles Krauthammer, in particular, continued to excoriate Bush after 2 August for his slowness to grasp that Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. Saddam, the pundit argued, wanted to swallow up Kuwait first, and then Saudi
Arabia. Moreover, Saddam would undoubtedly “get what he wants because there is no one to stop him…George Bush is not eager to get bogged down in a land war in a God-forsaken patch of desert.” [46]
The New York Times’s veteran foreign-affairs reporter Flora Lewis took up the Munich refrain in a column entitled “Fruits of Appeasement,’ in which Saddam’s “blitzkrieg invasion” caused “European commentators to remember Hitler.” Saddam Hussein was determined, Hitler-like, to bend the Western powers to his will, Lewis asserted. Through nuclear arms and control of Middle Eastern oil, he aimed at nothing less than altering “the whole balance of power.”[47] Times editorialist A.M. Rosenthal weighed in ponderously on 5 August: the Western powers had “failed in their duty” to confront “the plainest threats of aggression since Adolf Hitler.” [48] A syndicated editorial cartoon, showing Saddam giving the Nazi salute to a picture of Hitler, ran in the Miami Herald and a number of other newspapers during the first week of August.[49] The pundit assault eased somewhat after 8 August, when Bush made to the nation a televised speech, making it clear that American military forces were en route to the Persian Gulf.
Media pundits framed the Iraq invasion as a replay of the 1930s, creating a master narrative in which the Hitler equation raised the spectre of Munich and the Munich analogy functioned as a moral imperative upon “Hitler’s” opponent. Other pundits began to shade in the crude outline thus formed by analyzing the mind and personality of the psychopathic god. George Will explained that Hussein “radiates a more virulent and personal viciousness than Mussolini did.” “On meeting him,” noted a Time columnist, “a visitor is first struck by his eyes, crackling with alertness and at the same time cold and remorseless as snake eyes on the sides of dice. They are the eyes of a killer.” [50]
These sketches personalized the menace of the little-known Iraqi leader, and personalization \bolstered the credibility of the Munich-Hitler analogy. During the Cold War, the Munich analogy was generally applied to a communist threat without a clear-cut face. The threat emanated from an implacable expansionist ideology that had various faces, or no face. After America’s former ally invaded Kuwait, his cold, remorseless eyes gave new life to the Munich analogy by bringing the enemy into sharp focus once more.
While the print and broadcast media were constructing this eminently marketable narrative framework during the first week of August, events on the ground moved rapidly. Within a week of the invasion, the American president and his deputies had rallied the international community, including several key Arab nations, to condemn Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait. The European Community, Turkey, Japan, China, and Switzerland imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions. Most significantly, Secretaries Baker and Cheney persuaded the Saudi government to allow US troops to deploy on Arabian soil as a protective “shield.” War planes and soldiers began to pour onto Saudi Arabian bases—elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, Navy SEALs and other special forces, airmobile and armored units, and thousands of Marines. The deployment was well under way before Bush took his case to the American people in a televised speech on 8 August 1990.[51]
President Bush’s television address, his first formal speech to the American people on the crisis, began, “In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe.” The speech touched on the mythic dimension of American identity, connecting Americans of 1990 with the generation that had avenged Pearl Harbor and fought Hitler. “I ask for your support in a decision I’ve made, to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong,” Bush stated, suggesting a simpler, more positive era, one that knew not self-doubt. “Less than a week ago, in the early morning hours of 2 August, Iraqi armed forces, without provocation or warning invaded a peaceful Kuwait”[52] “Without provocation or warning” evoked Roosevelt’s speech before Congress after the Imperial forces of Japan had “suddenly and deliberately attacked” Pearl Harbor.[53]
Bush described Iraq’s tanks as “storm[ing] in blitzkrieg fashion through Kuwait in a few short hours,” precisely as Hitler’s panzers had rolled into Czechoslovakia and Poland. Lest this evocation of Axis military power should seem incommensurate with the stature of a second-rate Third World tyrant, Bush explained that “[t]he stakes are high. Iraq is already a rich and powerful country that possesses the world’s second-largest reserves of oil, and over a million men under arms. It’s the fourth largest military in the world.” These assurances and the Hussein-Hitler equation forestalled arguments that Saddam’s ambitions were regional, rather than global, and were tied to specific historical and recent circumstances. Iraq had “massed an enormous war machine on the Saudi border...Given the Iraqi government’s history of aggression against its own citizens as well as its neighbors, to assume Iraq will not attack again would be unwise and unrealistic.” Thus had Hitler been appeased at Munich and aggression encouraged.
The 1938 Munich Conference provided the central image of the 8 August speech: “If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression, or it will destroy our freedoms… Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.” If history taught anything, Bush argued, it taught that Saddam Hussein’s territorial ambitions were equally insatiable. The moral imperative implicit in the Munich analogy taught that only force could restrain him.
William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston coined the term “the establishing phase” to denote the period of the Gulf crisis from the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August to the President’s televised speech on 8 August. It was in the first week, they contend, “that the news media and political elites first accepted what came to be the dominant rhetorical frame for understanding the Gulf conflict.” [54] The dominant rhetorical frame was Munich. The mobilization of elite opinion in the media (and perhaps on Capitol Hill) early in August put political pressure on George Bush to take an aggressive stand, or be stigmatized as a Chamberlain. Neoconservative pundits had been castigating Bush as an “appeaser” for many months to little effect. The invasion of Kuwait created a huge media forum where the analogy now resonated.
The Bush administration’s decision to mobilize troops, announced in medias res on 8 August, set the scene for what Dorman and Livingston designated the Gulf crisis’s “nominal debate phase.” Between 9 August and the U.N. deadline of 15 January 1991, political elites built consensus on the possibility of war, if not on precise war aims or the terms on which war should be waged. Political debate over the nature of the enemy was nominal indeed; the Munich and Hitler analogies prevailed, and this era might more aptly be styled “the media saturation phase.” Although here and there an editorialist criticized the reiteration of the Saddam-equals-Hitler theme, some of these criticized only to reaffirm the analogy’s appropriateness, as the Time columnist who avowed that “[i]n the case of Saddam, the name-calling is far from preposterous. He has unleashed a blitzkrieg against a weak neighbor…committed mass murder…”[55] The few journalists who warned of “the dangers of demonization” tended to hedge on denying the metaphor outright, and so served to keep the Munich analogy before the public, and perhaps reinforced it.[56]
As August wore on, Bush referred repeatedly to the lesson of the 1930s. Addressing the Pentagon, Bush warned that “A half a century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor,” and he pledged not to make that mistake again.[57] Bush’s speeches shaped the conflict as one of good against evil, while investing the crisis with a sensibility redolent of World War II. By proclaiming that Iraq “threatened our way of life,” Bush projected the regional conflict on a global scale and conflated, in the same breath, the consumption of oil and gasoline with traditional ideals.[58] This rhetorical feat probably helped deflect onto another target the resentment Americans already felt towards U.S. oil companies as gasoline prices shot up another ten or fifteen cents at the pump during August.[59] A Gallup poll taken on August 8-9 found that 58% of Americans thought the U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia “should engage in combat” if Saddam Hussein “begins to control or cut off world oil.” The same poll showed that only 42% thought U.S. forces should fight if Saddam “refuse[d] to leave Kuwait and restore its rulers.” [60]
“By the end of August,” Dan Quayle recalled, “the Saudi desert was filling up with GIs and I was out on the road in my salesman’s role, explaining the rationale for our involvement on the Arabian Peninsula.” Quayle was Bush’s emissary to the American heartland in the autumn of 1990, speaking in American Legion posts and malls to rally support for the coming war. Addressing at the annual American Legion convention in Indianapolis, Quayle told the assembled Legionnaires that in the midst of so many hopeful changes in the post-cold war era, they were now faced with
a man who rules through terror and slaughter, who has used poison gas against his own countrymen … who aspires to gain control of the oil resources on which the entire world depends for economic well-being; who threatens his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction; and who poses a growing threat to the peace and stability of the region.” [61]
“Was it any wonder,” Quayle pondered in his memoir, that the President had insisted “that Saddam’s aggression ‘would not stand?’” “The uncertainties about our ultimate objectives in the Middle East had gone.” The Bush administration wanted Saddam Hussein, the Middle East’s new Hitler, “back where he had been before August 1.” [62]
By September, President Bush had established himself in the public mind as a forceful leader and a skilful diplomat who had assembled a wide coalition of allies to stand against Saddam’s naked aggression. Many Americans probably shared Newt Gingrich’s “sense of awe at how brilliantly Bush has handled this.” [63] Although Bush had narrowly escaped becoming a ritual casualty of the Munich analogy, the mantle of Chamberlain was still rhetorically available for other shoulders. In the heated partisan atmosphere of a Congressional election year, which no calls for “national unity” could overcome even under the shadow of war, the Chamberlain mantle began to gravitate to the Congress, where it hovered over the shoulders of those members who opposed or questioned the Bush administration’s actions or strategies. “Appeaser” equaled “wimp” in the shorthand of the day. A New York Times column of 14 September speculated that “the wimp mantle has been passed from George Bush to Capitol Hill.”[64] On Capitol Hill, the unwanted mantle was passed back and forth—Republicans could garner political capital by castigating Bush’s opponents as Chamberlainesque appeasers, and the President could still be styled an appeaser by hawkish Democrats who wanted more force, quicker results, and discerned some residual advantage in pointing out that Bush’s initial appeasement of Saddam Hussein had invited the aggression in the first place.[65]
Media pundits threw their support behind the President’s show of military force. Many of them, indeed, had been instrumental in creating a narrative in which a show of force was necessary. Whether the American people would a support a war was another matter. On 9 August, a poll showed that 77% of Americans approved of Bush’s handling of the Gulf crisis. By 29 October, only 61% approved.[66] That autumn, the American public was the target of one of the largest public-relations blitzes in U.S. history. Beginning in August, the Kuwaiti government-in-exile and its supporters in the U.S. poured tens of millions of dollars into public-relations, law and lobby firms in a campaign to mobilize American support for military intervention. Led by PR firm Hill & Knowlton, these firms saturated the media with newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, media “fact kits,” and video news releases on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. Dozens of pro-Kuwait organizations appeared, including “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” a Hill & Knowlton-created front group, into which the firm channeled $11.9 million in Kuwaiti funds.[67] In August, Citizens for a Free Kuwait placed an advertisement in the New York Times, thanking President Bush and the American people for refusing to be Chamberlains:
…the world cannot permit this prospect [of a new era of world peace] to be undermined by another 1939 [sic] Munich where appeasement led to further aggression. The American people well know the cost of appeasement and are fully aware that an aggressor, bent on conquest, will not be stopped by any concession to his appetite.[68]
Citizens for a Free Kuwait staged two major events that reinforced the identification of Saddam with Hitler. One was the testimony on Iraqi atrocities given before Congress members in October 1990. On 10 October, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus heard a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl testify anonymously that she had been in the al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City when marauding Iraqi soldiers arrived and removed 312 premature babies from incubators and left them “on the cold floor to die.” “Citizens for a Free Kuwait” also distributed a media kit containing the girl Nayirah’s written testimony about the Iraqi atrocities. Citizens for a Free Kuwait made another, similar presentation to the United Nations Security Council in November, shortly before the UN would vote to authorize the use of force. In the period between 10 October and the launching of Operation Desert Storm, President Bush, administration members, Congressmen, television pundits, columnists, and radio talk show hosts repeated and discussed as fact the story of infants torn from incubators. President Bush frequently cited the story of the babies who died “scattered like firewood” on the cold floor.[69] “Of all the accusations made against the dictator,” observed Harper’s publisher John MacArthur, “none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators.”[70]
Dan Quayle, whom the press treated with nonstop levity during his term as vice president, was nonetheless a serious politician with a serious foreign-policy agenda.[71] Bush had chosen the Indiana senator for his ties to the Republican right wing. Quayle could speak for, and to, a major constituency of conservative Christians in the nation’s heartland. In the White House, Quayle surrounded himself with neoconservatives. His chief of staff was William Kristol, whom he had met through Kenneth Adelman,[72] an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld in the 1970s and an arms-control official during the Reagan era.[73] In November, Joseph Shattan, another Reaganite neoconservative (and former speechwriter for Jeane Kirkpatrick), wrote for Quayle “what I consider the most important speech in my four years as Vice President.”[74] The heart of his 29 November address at Seton Hall, Quayle noted, “went to what I saw as the first crisis of the post-cold war world.” In this “new world order,” Quayle argued, “parallels and precedents and the long historical view were more important than ever.” The speech’s main historical parallel consisted of the Western powers’ dilemma in the 1930s as Hitler grew ever more aggressive. Quayle’s central, Churchillian message, that “resoluteness at the right hour” would have prevented the Second World War, was surely not lost on his audience.[75]
As Operation Desert Shield assembled its forces in Saudi Arabia, Bush continued to invoke Munich. “In World War II,” military officers at Pearl Harbor were told, “the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor who could have been stopped. Appeasement leads only to further aggression, and, ultimately, to war. And we are not going to make the mistake of appeasement again.”[76] On 1 November, Bush cited “the awful similarity” between the entry of Iraqi troops into Kuwait and “what happened when the [Nazi] Death’s Head Regiments went into Poland.”[77] November saw the culmination of Bush’s efforts to equate the Gulf crisis with Munich. A weeklong trip through Europe and the Middle East carried Bush to Czechoslovakia. His first words to the Czech Federal Assembly invoked the “parallels between the appeasement that preceded the unopposed Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.” Bush argued that when nations faced with aggression turned away from, in Neville Chamberlain’s phrase, “a quarrel in a faraway country between a people of whom we know nothing,” tragic consequences ensued. Bush’s rhetoric was growing progressively more Manichaean, verging on the apocalyptic at times. “Good will prevail,” he avowed in his Prague address; “The darkness in the desert sky cannot stand against the way of light.”[78]
The continual iteration of the Hitler equation and Munich analogy had its effect on the
American public. A Newsweek article of 26 November cited the findings of a Gallup poll taken on 15-16 November: “Some people have compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. Do you agree or disagree with this comparison?” 53% of respondents agreed, while 41% disagreed.[79]
Munich over Vietnam
Lyndon Johnson had said, “Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam...then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression...and so would begin World War III.”[80] Although President Bush had determined that he would not give a big fat reward to aggression and so trigger World War III, everything he knew about history made him uneasily aware, as 15 January approached, that history afforded other analogies besides Munich, and that one in particular warned Americans of the hazards attendant upon intervening militarily in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom they knew nothing. Hitler and Munich had dominated the discourse in the Gulf Crisis. By December 1990, the dark specter of “a new Vietnam” dampened the World War II mood. In a Gallup poll of 15-16 November, only 24% of those polled thought President Bush “should quickly begin military action against Iraq” while 70% thought he should “wait to see if economic sanctions are effective.”[81] In 1990 the majority of Americans were reluctant to intervene militarily in a foreign land, and the conventional wisdom held that the Vietnam War had conditioned this outlook.
“Bush is betting his presidency, well aware that Vietnam cost LBJ his,” one pundit argued, while others hastened to explain “Why the Gulf is Not Vietnam.”[82] As the U.N. deadline for Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait neared, President Bush began to spend less time assuring the public that he was no Neville Chamberlain, and more time reassuring it that he was not Lyndon Johnson.[83] The war (if war should come), would not be “a protracted, drawn-out war” like the Vietnam War, and Bush enumerated the ways in which the coming war would be different: the “forces arrayed are different; the opposition is different...the countries united against him in the United Nations are different; the topography of Kuwait is different, and the motivation of our all-volunteer force is superb.” [84] In January, Vice President Quayle visited the troops in the Gulf, bringing them the message “they most wanted to hear…that this will ‘not be another Vietnam.’”[85] Thus the Vietnam analogy became the Munich analogy’s rhetorical opponent, and the two analogies guided the debate over whether not to go to war.
America’s poorly-defined national aims had compounded the debâcle of Vietnam. With this idea in mind, pundits and politicians began to demand that the president clarify his policy (or war), aims—if Americans were to fight and die in the Gulf, precisely what would they be dying for? For a “free Kuwait,” a restored balance of power, to ensure the flow of oil, or in order to remove the “new Hitler” from power? “The administration’s failure to state its aims with clarity and candor,” warned neoconservative defense expert Richard Perle, “is creating a policy vacuum likely to be filled by those opposed to a firm line against Hussein. Already the specter of Vietnam haunts the emerging debate.”[86] In a New York Times editorial, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig ponderously warned that the Bush administration must neither reward aggression à la Munich, nor be trapped by its rhetoric into going to war without well-defined military goals, as in Vietnam.[87] Bush’s “policy vacuum” did indeed prompt his Democratic opponents to counter Munich with Vietnam. In November, House speaker Thomas Foley and Senate majority leader Richard Gephardt jointly proclaimed Bush’s aims in the Gulf “muddled”: “President Bush has stopped emphasizing the need to protect oil supplies…He now concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing Mr. Hussein to Hitler.” The Democrats urged the President to justify his choice of historical analogies, and clarify whether the U.S. was really heading off another Hitler, or about to repeat “the Vietnam experience.”[88] Bush was forced to assure the public that “no Vietnam” was going to take place. Bush continued to make such assurances after the air attack on Baghdad had been underway for several weeks.[89]
It would be pleasing to say that the Congressional debates, held only a few days before the U.N. deadline, had much to do with the outcome of the crisis, but this was not the case. As Eric Alterman observed in 1992, “by the time Congress finally got around to exercising its constitutional prerogative to determine whether to commit the nation to war,” Congress’s role had almost ceased to matter.[90] But it had not ceased to matter entirely. The televised debates demonstrated publicly the political alignments and positions of America’s legislators, and revealed a full-blown “war party” flush with life. Failure to pass a war resolution would not have restrained the President from attacking Iraq: “In truth, even had Congress not passed the resolution I would have acted and ordered our troops into combat,” Bush stated flatly in his political memoir. “I know it would have caused an outcry, but it was the right thing to do. I was comfortable in my own mind that I had the constitutional authority.”[91] The historical analogy that urged military confrontation had prevailed over the analogy that counseled restraint months before, in August, when the President committed U.S. military forces to the Gulf. The presence of nearly 600,000 American and “allied” troops, assembled on foreign soil by executive authority and presidential diplomacy, ensured that a diplomatic solution (had one been arrived at) would be unsatisfactory to the pundits, the president, and perhaps the public. The Bush administration had, by its rhetoric, committed itself and the Congress to a war from the beginning of the crisis. The Munich analogy, embraced by Bush but also wielded against him by the neoconservative foreign-policy punditocracy as a cudgel with which to chastise him when he “went wobbly,” had succeeded in defining the crisis for the nation.[92] So narrow and Manichaean a narrative of “good versus evil” had been established, by the time of the Congressional debates, that any position advanced as an alternative to war was indeed made to appear “the equivalent of national humiliation, retreat, denial, and cowardice in the face of evil.”[93]
To suggest that the Congressional debates were a ritual whereby the legislative branch veiled its impotence to control the outcome of the Gulf crisis is not to say that many in the Congress did not make forceful, historically-based arguments against war and in favor of allowing some less drastic form of coercion to induce Saddam to withdraw. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, for example, pointed out the irony of deciding to oppose “naked aggression” in one case when history afforded so many other instances of naked aggression that had gone unchallenged by the United States:
…Not too long ago, Syria—now one of our allies—Syria went into Lebanon and massacred 750 civilians. Well, that’s naked aggression. We didn’t do anything about it…What about Indonesia’s bloody excursion into East Timor, where they basically wiped out a country, killed a lot of people? We didn’t do anything. Or when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in his own country. That’s naked aggression. We didn’t do anything…Does this mean that we are now going to say that the United States will indeed become the policeman of the world, and that we will respond to every instance of naked aggression? Or does it mean that we’re just going to kind of pick and choose which ones we want to respond to or not.[94]
History, or competing versions of history, is a time-honored constituent of American political argument. The U.S. Congress weighed the two most resonant historical analogies of the day, Munich and Vietnam, in order to generate (or reject), a historically-anchored casus bellum. In the January, 1991 debates a ritualized version of history operated as a shorthand for discussing the projected war in terms of “just war theory,” the set of moral norms derived from Catholic theology and Enlightenment political thought that inform the rules of warfare found in international law.[95]
During the three days of Congressional debates in 1991, politicians such as Rep. Ike Shelton, a Democrat, proclaimed that “Chamberlain...returned from the Munich meeting with Adolf Hitler, proclaiming ‘peace in our time.’ How wrong he was…The lesson in history of which I speak is found in the phrase, ‘We should have stopped him when we could.’”[96] In the global vision of Senator McCain of Arizona, any appeasement of Saddam Hussein would not only encourage one dictator, but would ensure the rise of “a succession of dictators.” “And those dictators will see a green light, a green light for aggression, a green light for annexation of its weaker neighbors. And, indeed, over time a threat to the stability of this entire globe.”[97]
These congressional Churchillians, for whom the Gulf crisis was a simulacrum of Munich to be resolved only by military confrontation, believed that the president had in his favor all the elements of jus ad bellum (the right to wage war): just cause, legitimate authority, and right intent.[98] The Munich analogy had simplified a complex situation into one of good versus evil. Who could doubt that the cause of preventing a Hitler-like figure from committing further aggression was just, or doubt that America’s intent—to free Kuwait and punish aggression—was right and moral? As to legitimate authority, the president’s opponents never argued that the commander-in-chief had not the power to deploy troops. As the debates issued in a resolution authorizing Bush to attack,[99] the question of precisely what authority he had to make war under the Constitution, which must have arisen had Congress withheld consent, never obstructed the path to war, and the unresolved questions about the efficacy of the War Powers Act of 1973 were never seriously raised.[100]
Congress members who opposed the Gulf war raised some doubt about Bush’s just cause and right intent (several Democrats contended that “the reason we are in the Persian Gulf is oil”), but the main force of their antiwar argument derived from a historical analogy—that of Vietnam. A debater asking whether the war would be “another Vietnam” questioned, in effect, the president’s claim to satisfy the requirements of jus in bello as understood by average Americans. Justice in the waging of war stipulated that force must be proportional to the evil it opposed, so that the damage must be less, preferably much less, than the original wrongdoing. For most antiwar debaters, the pertinent “lesson” of Vietnam was that “proportionality” had been violated, as had the principle of “discrimination” which designated soldiers only as objects of attack and exempted civilians and their means of supporting life. Gulf War opponents’ construction of jus in bello leaned heavily towards avoiding the loss of American lives—many, like John Glenn of Ohio, emphasized the dismal and Vietnam-conditioned prospect of “flag-draped coffins of soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen…in the hangars in Dover, Delaware.” Rep. Barbara Boxer showed a more transnational sense of war’s injustices, foreseeing “a huge price if we choose this route…The price is in body bags, in babies killed, in an uncertain, unstable Middle East even after the crisis. In a decade that will be lost as we once again have put our resources into war and weapons and rob our people of what they need in this country.”[101]
War supporters drew an entirely different “lesson” from Vietnam. Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, construed it thus:
There were lessons in Vietnam. Saddam Hussein thinks he’s learned one, that the United States has no national resolve, that Americans will do anything short of shedding blood, that the Congress will pick apart the President and undermine our troops and our strategy, and let him have his violent way. Mr. Speaker, let us learn him a new lesson.
For Senator Robert Dole, as well, the master lesson of Vietnam was that domestic opposition to any war encouraged, and gave aid and comfort to, the enemy. Saddam Hussein had not backed down because he thought he had learned a lesson from America’s failure in Vietnam and its aftermath. “It’s because he thinks, when push comes to shove, we won’t [fight]. He doubts our will. He doubts our staying power. He doubts our unity.”[102]
As the Munich analogy had constricted the narrative of the Kuwait invasion, it also constricted the terms of the Congressional debates into a contest between simplified, decontextualized historical analogies. The presence in “the field” of several hundred thousand U.S. and allied troops also constricted the aggregate American moral imagination embodied in the Congress. The presence of these troops “in harm’s way,” or nearly so, forestalled discussion of other aspects of morality in war, not that it was likely that the morality of the unrestricted air war and strategic bombing of civilian infrastructures, which had been principles of US air power doctrine since WWII, would be debated by politicians at any time. It is rarely a good moment for American politicians to discuss the relation to jus in bello of the kind of warfare that is overwhelmingly asymmetrical in the technological level of weaponry if not in the relative numbers of combatants. A senator could assert in January 1991 that Saddam Hussein “now has under arms more men than Hitler when the German Army marched into the Rhineland,” without fear that the most outspokenly antiwar Congressman would call attention to the disproportionate levels of risk posed by the projected war to Americans and to Iraqis.[103]
The Gulf crisis debate marked an epoch in the development of two historical analogies that have entered into American folk culture. The relentless application of the Munich analogy during the Gulf crisis and Gulf War promoted a simple, easy-to understand model for assessing a foreign threat and for gauging whether war was the correct response. Under this model’s influence, foreign threats tended to take on absolute and Hitlerian proportions, and among the possible responses to such threats, military measures would always be deemed appropriate, and diplomatic efforts would always smack of Chamberlainism and appeasement, and be thought likely to encourage further aggression. As hammered out on the anvils of partisan politics and partisan political journalism during the Persian Gulf crisis, the cardinal “lesson” of Vietnam came to be less a warning against unwise or wrongful intervention, and more a criticism of war’s opponents. These meanings had been in competition since the days of the Vietnam War itself, of course, but the Gulf war “licked the Vietnam syndrome” (as President Bush rejoiced in March 1991), and not only in terms of overcoming the national aversion to military intervention. The Gulf crisis reversed the Vietnam analogy’s popular valence, so that, rather than conveying a meaning poles apart from Munich, it could be popularly construed as a complementary analogy, one that reinforced a case for war.
Munich über Alles
The outbreak of war last month has spurred a tremendous surge of patriotism, one with which some advertisers have moved swiftly to ally themselves. Yellow ribbons are popping up everywhere in support of U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. Now an ad medium, Gannett Outdoor Group, has decided to join the movement, and has started placing an ad equating Saddam Hussein with Hitler and Stalin in some of its outdoor markets.[104]
We say, repeatedly, that ideas have consequences, which is true but what we have in mind are complex, thoughtful, and well-articulated ideas. What we so easily overlook is the fact that simple ideas, allied to passion and organization, also have consequences.[105]
After nearly destroying Iraq’s military installations and civilian infrastructure in forty days of aerial bombardment, the American-led coalition drove Saddam’s forces from Kuwait in one of the most lopsided victories in history, generating an outpouring of nationalist feeling and prognostications of a whole new era of American military confidence. President Bush crowed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!”[106] And yet neoconservatives, such as journalist Max Boot, found that “the Vietnam mindset—characterized by excessive caution about open-ended, low-intensity operations—was very much alive in the war’s aftermath.”[107] Bush had chosen to end the ground war after 100 hours of combat, leaving elements of Iraq’s elite Republican Guard intact and Saddam Hussein in place as head of state. Reasons suggested for this include the administration’s reluctance to generate more media images of the one-sided slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops, the U.N. mandate which stipulated only the restoration of Kuwait and not conquest and regime change, and the possibility of civil war and regional destabilization. The operant reason was probably the Pentagon’s reluctance to undertake the mission of occupation and nation-building.[108]
Jeffrey Record observed that Bush’s prewar insistence on the Saddam-Hitler equation also “damaged the Bush administration’s position, since Hitler would hardly have been permitted to remain Germany’s Führer after World War II. Hitlers deserve nothing less than death or capture.”[109] As Bush had “declared a victory and gone home,” he had no further options except to fall back on the same policies—economic sanctions and calls for the Iraqi people to oust Saddam—that he had disdainfully rejected as “appeasement” before Desert Storm. George Bush had temporarily appeased his neoconservative critics by warring with Baghdad, but they were unsatisfied by the ceasefire and U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power and not to intervene in the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that Bush had called for in the wake of Operation Desert Storm brought forth new accusations of “appeasement” and betrayal, and not only from the neoconservative columnists.[110] Bill Moyers, in a Washington Post Magazine interview, asserted that Bush had panicked into war, and then “panicked again and, with his prey on the run—Hitler in the bunker—he failed to finish the job.”[111] More historical analogies came into play. Wall Street Journal editorialist Max Boot wrote that Bush’s “excessive caution” stemming from the Vietnam syndrome, had turned the Persian Gulf into “a Hungary, a replay of 1956.”[112] A.M. Rosenthal of the Times compared Bush’s abandonment of the Iraqi Kurds to the Soviet Army in 1944, standing by at the Vistula while the Germans brutally put down the Polish uprising.[113]
Regime change historically had not been a well-received public rationale for making war, and neoconservatives had to come around gradually to asking for Saddam’s removal. Charles Krauthammer led the way, as he had led in applying the Munich analogy. In January 1990, he had asserted, “Our goal today, as in 1943, should be unconditional surrender. That does not mean the establishment of a MacArthur regency in Baghdad. Beyond eliminating Saddam, Iraq’s internal politics are not our concern. They are, moreover, far beyond our control.”[114] By the war’s end, he was urging that “it’s time to finish Saddam.”[115] “We have entered a period of Pax Americana,” Krauthammer proclaimed. “Why deny it? Every other nation on Earth would like to be in our position. Why be embarrassed? The tired, the poor, the huddled masses of the world who cannot gain admittance to Pax Americana through immigration hope that we might have some of it for export. We should say to them: Where our interests demand it and our values permit, we will.”[116]
Munich and the Misrepresentation of War in the “Bush Doctrine” Era
The online message board of the Greeley Tribune, a small-town Colorado newspaper, provided the original impetus for this paper. In 2003 and 2004, the Trib’s message board hosted a great many arguments in favor of, and in opposition to, the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The overall intellectual tone of this discourse was low, peppered with bad grammar, worse spelling, factual inaccuracies of all kinds, garbled personal and place names, expletives, insults, and threats of bodily harm towards other message-posters. Among those in favor of war, the most popular argument offered to counter or quash criticism of Bush’s war was a historical analogy: Munich 1938. Message-posters who thought invading Iraq was a bad idea were styled the sort of people who “wouldn’t have stood up to Hitler!” References to Nazi Germany, the Sudetenland, Neville Chamberlain, appeasement, spineless liberal appeasers, flowed freely. One anonymous warhawk even mentioned Eduard Beneš. (Perhaps congratulations are due the History Channel for sowing the seed of knowledge far and wide.)
In the course of arguing about Bush’s Iraq on the Tribune’s online board, the present writer became convinced that message posters who invoked Munich had little information about other historical events and periods, had taken under consideration no other analogies that might apply to the situation currently under discussion, and were invoking Munich because it cast them on the good-guy winner side and their opponents on the side of despicable losers and abettors of a leader popularly regarded as the worst tyrant in history. The Munich analogy, as understood in 2003-2004, demonstrated the completion of a process that elided the huge and complex historical narrative of the Second World War into a simple moral syllogism that conferred victory and virtue on the party invoking it.
“The new American militarism draws much of its sustaining force from myth—stories created to paper over incongruities and contradictions that pervade the American way of life,” wrote Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism.[117] Munich is one of the myths, indeed it is the paramount myth that sustains American militarism. During the decades of the Cold War, the Munich narrative came to be absorbed into American popular mythology, and emerged at the Cold War’s end as the premier “lesson” of World War Two for Americans. It is the quasi-historical myth that, for many, has come to define a new, militarized American identity—who we are, and what we purportedly stand for in the Manichaean post-Cold War universe.
The Munich analogy, with its exaltation of military force and derogation of “appeasement” dovetails nicely with other cultural assumptions that pervaded the post-Cold War years. Force is the only thing some peoples (or cultures) understand. All powers, persons, or organizations deemed a threat by those governing the U.S. are never acting in response to American policies or actions affecting their neighborhoods, but are thralls of an ideology bent on world domination. The best defense is a good offense.
The Munich analogy resurged in 2002-2003, as the Bush administration began beating the drums for another war against Iraq, this time in order to remove Saddam Hussein from power and establish some new form of government there. As the Bush administration prepared its case for war in 2002, a new round of punditry duly, and this time rather perfunctorily, revived the Persian Gulf Crisis-era equation of Saddam Hussein with Hitler, the confrontation over Iraq’s alleged weapons program to Munich, the critics of war to Neville Chamberlain, and George W. Bush to Winston Churchill: “Bush may not match Churchill's oratory,” argued a Christian Science Monitor editorialist, “but his forcefulness in vowing to remove the tyranny of Saddam Hussein is remarkably similar to Churchill's against Hitler.”[118] “[O]nly a mushroom cloud on the horizon would be proof enough for some leaders, who forget that appeasement didn't stop Adolf Hitler.”[119] The Munich analogy had proven itself flexible enough to encompass new enemies that comprised states, internal insurgents, and an international conspiracy with many faces, or no face. Resurrected in 2002, political leaders had no difficulty in stretching it further to accommodate an enemy that is a conflation of Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, and the even more diffuse threat of the “totalitarian political ideology” of militant Islam[120]
During the Cold War, Munich’s historical context evolved into a decontextualized morality narrative, in which non-military responses to hypothetical aggression elided into varieties of “appeasement,” and appeasement of absolute evil at that. The Munich analogy’s simplistic moral structure left American leaders little besides military confrontation as an acceptable response. The Munich analogy helped frame Cold War discussions of intervention in such a way that foreign interventions, which appeared to be elective in nature, became urgent national defense measures: “we’ve got to stop them in Korea (or Indochina, or Central America) or they’ll be digging foxholes in our back yards next,” and this accrued resonance has extended beyond the Cold War. The “saturation phase” preceding the first Gulf War inundated mass media with the Munich analogy, forced Americans at all levels to respond to it, and made its rigidly moralistic characterization of America and its new enemies part of the civil religion of the post-Vietnam generation. The events of 1990-91 strengthened the cultural embeddedness (as a component of national identity) of Munich and its moral imperative, popular identification with the analogy and underlies its continued ability to function in the Global War on Terror in despite of the historical dissonance involved.
Because the Munich analogy has become so culturally embedded in a mythic and nearly decontextualized form, the huge dissimilarities between Europe in 1938 and America and the Middle East in 2003 barely came under media discussion in the months preceding the war’s onset. Since the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Munich analogy has continued to function as a key element in a dominant national narrative of America-the-Good-versus-evil-enemies in a form made more simplistic, more virulent, and more intractable to rational argument because of its role in that conflict.
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[1] 1. Harry S Truman, “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea, July 19, 1950” Truman Library [online source] [accessed 12 April 2005]
[2] Göran Rystad, Prisoners of the Past: The Munich Syndrome and Makers of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era. (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1982) 49, 59.
[3] Quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 264.
[4] Peter McGrath, “The Lessons of Munich” Newsweek (3 October 1988): 37.
[5] Rystad, 41.
[6] Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing; Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964” Reagan Library [online source] [accessed 14 April 2005]
[7] McGrath, 37.
[8] See Rystad’s Prisoners of the Past for a wealth of further examples.
[9] Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past; The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York, Oxford University, 1973), ix.
[10] Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, (Princeton: Princeton University,1992).
[11] Andrew J. Taylor and John T. Rourke, “Historical Analogies in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process” Journal of Politics 57, 2 (May 1995): 460-68.
[12] Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002).
[13] McGrath, 37.
[14] “Legionnaires Hear Reagan Attack Peace Movement” Christian Science Monitor (24 August 1983): 2.
[15] Merrill Hartson, “Reagan Seeks Midwest Support for Bush.” Associated Press (30 September 1988).
[16] Senator Jesse Helms, one might add, regularly invoked Munich and appeasement over every proposed arms-control treaty for two decades. Helen Dewar, “Senators Repel MX Censure from College Republicans” Washington Post (23 March 1985): A6.
[17] Gary J. Dorrien’s Neoconservative Mind gives a fuller account of the complex intellectual lineages of neoconservatives and their thought than does John Ehrman’s The Rise of Neoconservatism. Ehrman leaves out the influences of 1930s Trotskyism and the Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss. See Gary J. Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993), 1-18; and John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1995).
[18] The present paper discusses only the general foreign-policy principles of leading pundits and defense officials from the 1970s to 1991. Neoconservative social critics and editorialists included Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, Morton B. Zuckerman, A. M. Rosenthal, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservative officials who served in the Reagan administration, many of whom began as aides to Senator Henry Jackson in the 1970s, included U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Pipes.
[19] Bayard Rustin and Carl Gershman, “Africa, Soviet Imperialism and the Retreat of American
Power” Commentary 64, 4 (October 1977).
[20] Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). 80-6.
[21] Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994. (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1995), 108.
[22] For examples of Likud party rhetoric, see William Claiborne, “Israel Condemns West Europeans’ Stance on Mideast; Israel Likens Europe’s PLO Stand To WWII Appeasement Policy” Washington Post (16 June 1980): A1; and David K. Shipler, “Israeli Cabinet Harshly Denounces Venice Declaration” New York Times (June 16, 1980): A1.
[23] Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 161.
[24] Norman Podhoretz, “The State of the Jews” Commentary 76 (December 1983): 45.
[25] “Muammar Qadhafi; Desert Terrorists on the World Stage” U.S. News & World Report (7 May 1984): 3.
[26] Norman Podhoretz, “Appeasement by any other Name” Commentary 76 (July 1983).
[27] “Enter the Middle Eastern bogeyman,” wrote scholar Leon Hadar in 1991. “For the past year, neoconservative intellectuals have focused on the need for the US to confront the new transnational enemy from the East, radical Arab nationalism and Islamic ‘fundamentalism,’ or what Krauthammer termed the ‘global intifada.’ The operational implication of this type of reasoning is that the original intifada can be forgotten. The new, makeshift neoconservative line is that the removal of the Soviet threat in any Middle East calculation actually increases the value of the special relationship between the US and Israel, since the military strength of the Jewish state could serve as a deterrent to radical Arab regimes and help shore up shaky ones. By this vision, Israel becomes the contemporary crusader state, a bastion of the West. It was not a coincidence that writers like Krauthammer also supplied the ideological “Saddam-is-Hitler” formula that helped to press for the attack against Iraq.” Leon T. Hadar, “The ‘Neocons’: From the Cold War to the ‘Global Intifada’” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (April 1991): 27.
[28] Andrew Katell, “KGB Sends Border Guards to Lithuania, Which Denounces U.S. Stand.” Associated Press (24 April 1990); David Hoffman, “Bush and Gorbachev Proclaim Cooperation But Fail to Agree on Germany and Lithuania.” Washington Post (4 June 1990); A1.
[29] William Safire, “Baltics to Baghdad.” New York Times (30 March 1990): A31.
[30] A. M. Rosenthal, “We Are Warned.” New York Times (5 April 1990): A29.
[31] Charles Krauthammer, “Nightmare from the Thirties” Washington Post (27 July 1990): A21.
[32] “The Glaspie Transcript: Saddam Meets the U.S. Ambassador, July 25, 1990,” in Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf, ed., The Gulf War Reader (New York: Random House, 1991), 122-33.
[33] Charles Krauthammer, “Nightmare from the Thirties,” A21.
[34] Lantos, Rep. [CA] “The Iraqi Bully—A New Hitler” Congressional Record ONLINE 2 August 1990. Thomas. [Available at:] < > [accessed 9 April 2005]
[35] William Safire, “War Words” New York Times (26 August 1990): SM18.
[36] Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 97.
[37] George Will, “Wolf out of Babylon” Washington Post (3 August 1990): A23.
[38] Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 205.
[39] Gary R. Hess, Presidential Decisions for War: Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 163-4.
[40] Earlier, a White House spokesman had condemned the invasion, and called for ‘‘the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces,’’ while another announced the Administration was considering all options but declined to give details. Gordon, Michael R. “Iraq Army Invades Capital of Kuwait in Fierce Fighting.” New York Times (2 August 1990): A1.
[41] Quayle, 205.
[42] Bush published the following private journal entry of 7 September 1990. The president noted that Mrs. Thatcher was “staunch and strong and worries that there will be an erosion on force. She does not want to go back to the U.N. on use of force, nor do I. She does not want to compromise on the Kuwait government, nor do I. In essence, she has not “gone wobbly” as she cautioned me a couple of weeks ago…I love that expression.” George H. W. Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York, NY: Scribner, 1999), 479.
[43] R.W. Apple Jr., “Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait and Its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges United Action” New York Times (3 August 1990): A1, A8; Richard Wolf, “Congress, World: Harsh Reaction; In Washington, Partisan Potshots, Concern” USA Today (3 August 1990): A1.
[44] William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston, “News and Historical Content: The Establishing Phase of the Persian Gulf Policy Debate” in W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz, ed. Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 69.
[45] Eric Alterman, “Operation Pundit Storm” World Policy Journal 9, 4 (Fall 1992): 609
[46] Charles Krauthammer, “A Festival of Appeasement” Washington Post (3 August 1990): A23.
[47] Flora Lewis, “Fruits of Appeasement” New York Times (4 August 1990): 24.
[48] A.M. Rosenthal, “Making a Killer” New York Times (5 August 1990): E19.
[49] Quoted in Marjorie Williams, “Monster in the Making; Saddam Hussein; From Unknown to Arch-Villain in a Matter of Days” Washington Post (9 August 1990): D1.
[50] Quoted in ibid., D1.
[51] Russell Watson, “Battle Ready” Newsweek (August 20, 1990): 20; Lionel Barber, “Crisis in the Gulf; Bush succeeds in stiffening Saudi spines” Financial Times (8 August 1990): Sec.1, p.2.
[52] “‘If History Teaches Us Anything, It Is That We Must Resist Aggression’: Address by President Bush on the situation in the Middle East” Washington Post (9 August 1990): A36.
[53] The World War II analogy also quelled the notion that there had been any provocation or warning. For an incisive analysis of the Bush administration’s dealings with Saddam Hussein prior to August, 1990 and a brief historical account of Iraqi-Kuwaiti relations, see David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 43-50.
[54] William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston, “The Establishing Phase of the Persian Gulf Policy Debate,” in W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz, ed., Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 63-4.
[55] Strobe Talbott, “The Dangers of Demonization” Time 136, 8 (20 August 1990) [online source] available at: (accessed 6 April 2005)
[56] U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz, (D-NY) neoconservative and co-author of the House bill granting Bush war powers, wrote in January 1991, “President Bush’s parallels between Hitler and Saddam are wildly overdrawn. But if there are fundamental differences between Saddam and Hitler, there are also instructive similarities. Like Hitler, Saddam has an unappeaseable will to power combined with a ruthless willingness to use whatever means are necessary to achieve it.” Steven J. Solarz, “The Stakes in the Gulf” New Republic (January 9 and 14).
[57] R.W. Apple, Jr., “Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life’” New York Times (16 August 1990): A14.
[58] Americans understood that the supply of oil figured heavily in any concerns about changes to the balance of power in the Middle East, but were unclear and divided on whether the flow of oil constituted a legitimate casus bellum for Americans. Bush’s address tied the oil issue to American security and the ideals of friendship [with Saudi Arabia], sovereignty, and independence. “If History Teaches Us Anything,” A36.
[59] Robert Reinhold, “Around U.S., a Cautious Chorus of Support” New York Times (August 9, 1990): A1; Apple, “Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life,’” A14.
[60] Russell Watson, “Battle Ready” Newsweek (20 August 1990): 20.
[61] Quayle, 207-8. 62.
[62] Ibid., 208.
[63] Quoted in Richard Cohen, “Amidst Bush’s Success, Quayle Causes Unease” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (5 September1990): 3C.
[64] Nathaniel C. Nash, “Confrontation in the Gulf: Washington Talk; Congress and the Crisis: To Intervene or Not?” New York Times (13 September 1990): A10.
[65]The Munich analogy graced Congressional campaign rhetoric that autumn. Senator John Kerry’s Republican challenger, Jim Rappaport, deployed newspaper ads that questioned Kerry’s support for Israel and likened his stance on Iraq to that of Neville Chamberlain at Munich: “Kerry’s formula is the same diplomatic strategy used to appease Hitler before World War II. Like Mr. Kerry, the diplomats kept surrendering. They kept giving Hitler ‘wiggle room.’ Kerry, the affronted war veteran, issued a press rebuttal, stating: “Anyone who has fought for this country ought to resent it when some people throw around gratuitous references to Neville
Chamberlain or Adolf Hitler.” Michael Rezendes, “Kerry assails ads by Rappaport on Kuwait invasion” Boston Globe (4 October 1990): 48; “Bush tried to ‘appease’ Saddam before invasion, lawmakers charge” Toronto Star (19 September 1990): A16.
[66] Melinda Beck, Ann McDaniel and Russell Watson, “No Fear: A Newsweek Poll” Newsweek (29 October 1990): 33.
[67] “Citizens for Free Kuwait Files with FARA After a Nine-month Lag” O’Dwyer’s FARA Report 1, 9 (October 1991): 2; “H&K leads PR charge in behalf of Kuwaiti cause.” O’Dwyer’s PR Services Report 5, 1 (Jan. 1991): 8; Arthur E. Rowse, “Flacking for the Emir” The Progressive (May 1991): 22.
[68] Citizens for Free Kuwait, “Thank You President Bush and the American People (Display Ad 8)” New York Times (24 August 1991): A13.
[69] “HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax?” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (December 4 2002) [online source] available at:
[70] The “Congressional Human Rights Caucus” was not informed that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. Amnesty International at first accepted these atrocity stories, but an investigation in Kuwait after the war turned up no corroborating witnesses or evidence, and the human rights organization repudiated these claims in 1991. See David Campbell, “The Gulf War in Context,” in Michael McKinley, ed. The Gulf War: Critical Perspectives (St. Leonards, N.S.W., Australia: Allen & Unwin; Canberra: Dept. of International Relations, RSPAS, ANU, 1994), 43-4. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus was not an official Congressional committee, but an association chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, who were active in forging bipartisan support for military intervention in the Gulf. Congressmen Lantos and Porter also co-chaired of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a separate body that occupied free office space in Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 54, 58-60.
[71] Quayle’s foreign policy interest lay mainly in the areas of strategic defense and controlling the proliferation of arms in the Third World. In 1987, Quayle wrote an editorial piece in the Washington Post warning of the dangers of ballistic missile proliferation in the Third World, and particularly the Middle East.
[72] It was Ken Adelman who, in February 2002, made the celebrated prediction that “demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.” Kenneth Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq.” Washington Post (13 February 2002): A27.
[73] Quayle, 88.
[74] Ibid., 214.
[75] Ibid., 215.
[76] “Remarks to officers and troops at Hickham AFB in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, October 29, 1990” in George H. W. Bush, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1990. (Washington, DC: U.S. General Printing Office, 1990), 1483.
[77] “The President’s news conference in Orlando, Florida, November 1, 1990” in ibid., 1514.
[78] Ann Devroy, “Bush Likens Kuwaitis to Czechs; President Visits ‘Appeasement’s Lonely Victim,’ Condemns Saddam” Washington Post (18 November 1990): A23.
[79] Tom Morganthau, “Should We Fight?” Newsweek (26 November 1990): 26.
[80] Quoted in Kearns, 264.
[81] Morganthau, “Should We Fight,” 26.
[82] Stephen Budiansky, “Presidents and powers of war” U.S. News & World Report 109, 23 (10 December 1990): 10; Richard Perle, “Why the Gulf is not Vietnam” U.S. News & World Report 109, 20 (19 November 1990): 53.
[83] See Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 103.
[84] Evan Thomas, “No Vietnam” Newsweek (10 December 1990): 24.
[85] “Their morale, as I wrote in my diary, was ‘skyhigh,’ but everywhere I heard the same concern: ‘Let’s make sure we get the job done so we don’t have to come back here.’ That was the constant theme, and that’s what I reported to President Bush.” Quayle, 219-20.
[86] Perle, 53.
[87] Alexander M. Haig, Jr. “Gulf Analogy: Munich or Vietnam?” New York Times (10 December 1990): A19.
[88] Michael Oreskes, “A Debate Unfolds over Going to War against the Iraqis” New York Times (12 November 1990): A1.
[89] On 16 January, as the air war commenced, Bush said in a TV address, “I’ve told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam…Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world, and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back.” On Jan. 23, Bush repeated, “This will not be another Vietnam. Never again will our Armed Forces be sent out to do a job with one hand tied behind their back.” George H. W. Bush, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1991. (Washington, DC: U.S. General Printing Office, 1991), 44; 60.
[90] Alterman, “Operation Pundit Storm,” 609.
[91] Bush and Scowcroft, 446.
[92] Space will not permit enumeration of all the “Muniching” Bush was subjected to every time neoconservatives began to detect in him signs of “wobbliness” towards Saddam Hussein. Just as an example, however, when Secretary Baker met with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in November, Rep. Stephen Solarz, a neoconservative Democrat and co-author of the Congressional resolution authorizing force in the Gulf, remarked, “I hope and trust that this is not a prelude to a Middle East Munich.” Judith Miller, “Bush’s gambit; a way into war and a way out.” New York Times (2 December 1990): Sect. 4, p. 1.
[93] Alterman, “Operation Pundit Storm,” 609.
[94] “Confrontation in the Gulf; Day 2: Lawmakers Debate War and More Time for Sanctions” New York Times (12 January 1991): A6.
[95] For a discussion of the Vietnam War’s relation to just war theory, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 97-101, 188-96; 299-303. 309-15. For a group of essays on just war theory and the Gulf War, including one by Walzer, see David E. DeCosse, ed. But Was it Just?: Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War. (New York: Doubleday, 1992). For a critique of Walzer’s arguments in But Was it Just, see Campbell, Politics without Principle, 23-4, 49.
[96] “Confrontation in the Gulf,” A6.
[97] Ibid., A6.
[98] Another tenet of just war theory stipulates that war should be waged only as a “last resort;” this principle is structured into the U.N. Charter, Article 33 of which requires that parties must exhaust the peaceful means of settling a dispute before force can be used. Bush sent Secretary of State Baker, armed with a demand for unconditional withdrawal, for a last discussion with Iraq’s foreign minister on 9 January 1991, a few days before the UN deadline. This mission is widely believed to have been staged to show the U.S. Congress that war, if war came, would indeed be a “last resort;” see Campbell, 58-9.
[99] The Solarz-Michael Resolution passed in the House by a vote of 250 to 183. The Senate narrowly passed a similar resolution, 52 to 47.
[100] The War Powers Act, passed at the Vietnam War’s end, restricted the president’s powers to deploy US military forces abroad in hostile situations without prior Congressional approval. It required the president to report such action to both Houses of Congress within 48 hours, and provided that Congress could recall the troops despite a presidential veto. The act, passed over Nixon’s veto, aimed at restricting the president’s ability to engage in warfare without a Congressional declaration of war. Each president since its passage has disputed its constitutionality, and its provisions generally have been ignored—its status might have been tested had Congress refused its assent in 1991.
[101] “Confrontation in the Gulf,” A6.
[102] Ibid., A6.
[103] Senator Richard Bryan (R-NV), quoted in ibid., A6.
[104] “Ad Media Do Their Bit in War Effort” Adweek (11 February 1991).
[105] Irving Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1945-1995” Public Interest 121 (Fall 1995) 80-92.
[106] Russell Watson, “After the Storm; Mission Accomplished” Newsweek 117, 10 (March 11, 1991): 26.
[107] Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 321-2.
[108] 108. Jeffrey Record, Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1993), 108-9; 126-7.
[109] 109. Record, Making War, Thinking History, 157.
[110] New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal excoriated Bush’s appeasement and betrayal on a weekly basis after the ground war ended in March, 1991. See “On My Mind: How to Lose the Peace” New York Times (12 March 1991): A23; “On My Mind; Why the Betrayal?” New York Times (2 April 1991): A19; “On My Mind; America at the Vistula” New York Times (9 April 1991): A25.
[111] Eric Alterman, “Moyers on Washington” Washington Post (1 September 1991): W20.
[112] Boot, 322.
[113] A. M. Rosenthal, “On My Mind; America at the Vistula” New York Times (9 April 1991): A25.
[114] Charles Krauthammer “...And War Aims” Washington Post (23 January 1991): A17.
[115] Krauthammer, “It’s Time to Finish Saddam” Washington Post (29 March 1991): A21.
[116] Krauthammer, “Policy Monotheism's High Priest Speaks” Washington Post (24 March 1991): 3B.
[117] Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University, 2004), 97.
[118] John Hughes, “A Churchillian Moment” Christian Science Monitor (September 11, 2002): 10.
[119] “Our Allies Should Wake Up” Denver Post (13 September 2002): B-06.
[120] Sidney Blumenthal, “Bush Takes Refuge in History: Images of the Second World War Pepper the President's Rhetoric” Guardian (June 3, 2004): 25.
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