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
0
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 rearming 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
1
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
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] <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_
collections/korea/large/week2/kw_112_1.htm> [accessed 12 April 2005]
2
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
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.
3
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
6
Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing; Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964”
Reagan Library [online source] <http://www.reaganlibrary.com/reagan/speeches/rendezvous.asp> [accessed 14
April 2005]
7
McGrath, 37.
8
See Rystad’s Prisoners of the Past for a wealth of further examples.
4
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-thefact rationales.11
Most recently, Jeffrey Record has argued that Munich and Vietnam, the two mostemployed 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
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.
9
12
Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from
Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002).
5
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 posthoc 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.
6
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
13
14
McGrath, 37.
“Legionnaires Hear Reagan Attack Peace Movement” Christian Science Monitor (24 August 1983): 2.
7
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
Merrill Hartson, “Reagan Seeks Midwest Support for Bush.” Associated Press (30 September 1988).
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;
15
16
8
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
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).
9
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
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.
10
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
26
Norman Podhoretz, “Appeasement by any other Name” Commentary 76 (July 1983).
11
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
“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.
27
29
William Safire, “Baltics to Baghdad.” New York Times (30 March 1990): A31.
12
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
13
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
A. M. Rosenthal, “We Are Warned.” New York Times (5 April 1990): A29.
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:] < http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r101query.html> [accessed 9 April 2005]
30
31
14
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
William Safire, “War Words” New York Times (26 August 1990): SM18.
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.
35
36
15
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
38
Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 205.
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
39
16
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 eightyear 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
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.
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.
44
17
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, Hitlerlike, 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
Eric Alterman, “Operation Pundit Storm” World Policy Journal 9, 4 (Fall 1992): 609
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.
45
46
18
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
50
Quoted in ibid., D1.
19
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
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.
51
20
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 HusseinHitler 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.
21
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
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: <http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,970914,00.html> (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).
54
22
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
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.
57
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.
23
“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
62
Ibid., 208.
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.
63
24
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 governmentin-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 & Knowltoncreated 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:
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.
25
…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
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: <http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1637>
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;
68
26
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 postcold 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
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.
27
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
75
Ibid., 215.
“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.
76
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.
78
28
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
80
Quoted in Kearns, 264.
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.
81
29
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
Evan Thomas, “No Vietnam” Newsweek (10 December 1990): 24.
“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.
84
85
86
87
Perle, 53.
Alexander M. Haig, Jr. “Gulf Analogy: Munich or Vietnam?” New York Times (10 December 1990): A19.
30
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
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.
88
31
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
91
Bush and Scowcroft, 446.
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.
92
32
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
94
“Confrontation in the Gulf; Day 2: Lawmakers Debate War and More Time for Sanctions” New York
Times (12 January 1991): A6.
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.
95
33
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
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.
34
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
101
“Confrontation in the Gulf,” A6.
35
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
102
103
Ibid., A6.
Senator Richard Bryan (R-NV), quoted in ibid., A6.
36
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
104
105
“Ad Media Do Their Bit in War Effort” Adweek (11 February 1991).
Irving Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1945-1995” Public Interest 121 (Fall 1995) 80-92.
37
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
Russell Watson, “After the Storm; Mission Accomplished” Newsweek 117, 10 (March 11, 1991): 26.
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.
106
107
38
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
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.
110
39
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
116
Krauthammer, “Policy Monotheism's High Priest Speaks” Washington Post (24 March 1991): 3B.
40
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
117
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University, 2004), 97.
41
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 Islam120
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
John Hughes, “A Churchillian Moment” Christian Science Monitor (September 11, 2002): 10.
“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.
118
119
42
moralistic characterization of America and its new enemies part of the civil religion of the postVietnam 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.
43
Bibliography
Books and Journal Articles
Albright, David and Mark Hibbs. “Hyping the Iraqi bomb.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 47,
2 (March 1991): 26-28.
Alterman, Eric. “Operation Pundit Storm.” World Policy Journal 9, 4 (Fall 1992): 599-616.
Bacevich, Andrew J. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University, 2004.
Bennett, W. Lance 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.
Bennis, Phyllis and Michel Moushabeck. Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader. Brooklyn,
NY: Olive Branch Press, 1991.
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50
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