'This Guy is a Modern-Day Hitler'

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Norman Solomon's new book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, just published by John Wiley & Sons.

Evil that warrants the large-scale killing of war needs a face. But that face cannot belong to some amorphous mass of an enemy population; in fact, it's a ritual for the president to offer assurances that civilians who may be caught in the crossfire are not among the Pentagon's targets. The bull's-eye must be painted on someone who links the nascent war to an indisputably justified one of the past.

For this purpose, Hitler's name has been pressed into service, intermittently, for decades. Pointed mentions of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust open floodgates of emotion, connecting a present-day foe with a regime that slaughtered millions of people near the fulcrum of the twentieth century. What helps to do the trick is the message that while horrors of the past cannot be changed, they can be prevented in the near future.

At a press conference on July 28, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke about the need to escalate the Vietnam War, he used a historical analogy. "We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else," he said. "Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country, bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history." And Johnson declared: "We just cannot now dishonor our word."

A beauty of the Munich analogy, as several of LBJ's successors found, was that it could seem irrefutable on its own terms. The comparison might be very useful for likening a certain government to a Hitlerian menace.

Since the Vietnam era, various leaders -- most famously Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein -- have been promoted as sufficiently evil to necessitate U.S. military action. Singling out a particular villain (while winking at, or even cooperating with, a range of other tyrants) is vital to laying the rhetorical groundwork for war. To demonize -- and that's just about a prerequisite for war -- requires picking and choosing. With dozens of governments engaging in torture and political repression every day, sometimes accompanied by systematic military atrocities, targeting a specific regime is a matter of White House policy priorities.

During the 1980s those priorities involved so much hostility toward the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua that the momentum of Washington's rhetoric carried it to absurd comparisons with the Third Reich. At a World Affairs Council session in Boston on February 15, 1984, Secretary of State George Shultz said: "I've had good friends who experienced Germany in the 1930s go there and come back and say, 'I've visited many communist countries, but Nicaragua doesn't feel like that. It feels like Nazi Germany.'"

Two weeks later, Boston University president John Silber, a member of the Bipartisan Commission on Central America appointed by President Ronald Reagan, likened Nicaragua's "overt violence" to Nazi Germany, without a mention that the U.S. government was subsidizing most of the violence in Nicaragua with aid to the Contra guerrilla army.

Iraq I: Demonizing an Ally

When Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, abruptly soured the cordial relations between Washington and Baghdad, the White House suddenly propagated analogies between the Baathist and Nazi regimes. "A half century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor who should, and could, have been stopped," President George H. W. Bush said. "We are not going to make the same mistake again."