Pandagon

Analogous To A Fault

Matt Welch takes on the increasingly useless and disjointed Michael Totten's assertion that going to war with Saddam was like going to war with Hitler, because neither had anything to do with the sneak attacks that precipitated conflict with different entities. Matt makes the most important point - Hitler declared war on us.

The main reason that war on Iraq isn't comparable to war on Germany is that the two situations are totally different. Amazingly, people older than me can use analogies poorly as well...strange, that. Two allied states having declared war on the United States is not the same as a stateless terrorist organization having launched an attack on the United States (as well as all of Western Civilization) being connected with a secularized pan-Arab nationalist state with no significant ties to either the attack in question or, in any large part, the overall operational goals of the stateless terrorist organization. (Unless you're Laurie Mylroie, in which case Saddam is also behind the pothole on your street not getting fixed.)

At this point, supporters of the war need to sit down and realize that we went to war for a reason outlined by the government who conducted it, not their particular reason which is, more often than not, cleverly justified so as to be either ultimately unprovable or dependent on references to other conflicts, regardless of how accurate they are. War on Iraq can't be justified because war on Hitler was justified - it has to be justified on its own merits.