As an avid amateur military historian, I have to say that the contention of many that our way of life would have been adversely affected had we lost World War Two is simply not born out by the facts. It has been a timeworn tradition of war Presidents and national leaders to propagandize their citizens to believe such things to inspire them to fight with greater determination and fervency as well as to drum up support for wars whether or not fighting them was in the national interest. As a case in point, former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reportedly fond of pointing to a map tracing an arrow from Germany to French North Africa to Brazil up north through the Panama Canal to the United States as allegedly indicating how Hitler planned to evade US naval superiority and invade the United States. The US had the mightiest navy in the world with 100 aircraft carriers by 1945 including about 34 fleet carriers. The Germans never had any aircraft carriers during the war. Adolf Hitler did not even have a Navy and no long-range bombers capable of bridging the North Atlantic. Earlier this month, Congressman Ron Emmanuel (D-IL), the Chairman of the House Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee all but admitted then in lying the American people into war, Bush was following in the footsteps of past (Democrat) presidents presumably referencing FDR and LBJ.
This brings to mind the Bush administration's dubious allegations that Saddam was plotting to drop biological weapons on the US homeland using weapons and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that he did not even possess despite the fact that then CIA Director George Tenet had written in October 2002 that Iraq "appears to have drawn a line in the sand" against attacking the US with terrorist or WMD attacks. In any case, Hitler had no desire to continue the war beyond the Archangelsk-Astrakhan line in western Russia anyway and had no quarrel with either the US or the British Empire which he had long admired for its unparalleled successes in subjecting "the lesser races of the world", his unbelievably idiotic decision to declare war on the US on December 11, 1941 following the US declaration of war on Japan notwithstanding. Likewise, the Japanese never posed a threat to the continental USA as they never occupied any territory east of Wake Island or the Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska. Obviously, none of these facts takes away anything from the justness of our cause in World War Two, an essential foundation for going to war, which is noticeably lacking today with regards to the continuing no-win counterinsurgency war in Iraq.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, top members of the Bush administration distorted the facts in an attempt to justify their planned invasion of Iraq. Condi Rice made a shameless attempt to scare Americans with statements like "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" while Vice President Dick Cheney's made a knowingly bogus accusation that "Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons"u2014weapons which of course he never had. We know that Iraq posed far less of a threat to the United States than Nazi Germany, seeing that Saddam had destroyed his own chemical and biological weapons arsenal at least five years prior to our invasion and had only a handful of short range ballistic missiles according to the CIA's Duelfer report. I recently received an E-mail quoting Air Force Reserve Major General Chong stating that the war against terror including the present war in Iraq represents the greatest threat which America has ever faced in its entire history ignoring the fact that during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the Russians today could and can annihilate our country with thousands of nuclear warheads on a whim. The threat of nuclear attack from KGB-led Russia, Communist China and Stalinist North Korea, each capable of killing millions of Americans poses a much greater and immediate threat to this country then the threat from Islamist terrorists today.
As has been the case with most wars and certainly the present-day war in Iraq, World War Two could have been avoided had men of vision led the Western nations during this turbulent period in world history. Had FDR not conspired to incite the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor and sink our Pacific Fleet battleships as a back-door to US entry into the war against Germany, the US would have remained neutral. US neutrality was in accordance with the wishes of 80% of the American people who most agreed at the time had been lied to and deceived into fighting World War I by President Wilson and his chief war propagandist George Creel against their national interest. From 1935-1939, British Prime Ministers' Baldwin and Chamberlain's policy was to allow Hitler to pursue his longtime plan to drive east and invade the Soviet Union after Poland in an attempt to destroy Bolshevikism once and for all as he outlined was his plan in his autobiography Mein Kampf and as was subsequently reported by British intelligence.
Had Britain and France continued this foresighted policy, instead of guaranteeing Poland and declaring war on Nazi Germany prematurely while doing nothing to prevent it from being overrun by the Wehrmacht, it is likely that the Nazi Germans and the Soviet Communists would have bled each other dry. The final outcome would likely have been the Red Army forcing a German withdrawal back to their pre-war starting line or perhaps even the overthrow of Nazi Germany without a shot ever having been fired by the Western allies. This same policy was supported by America First Committee supporters and future US Presidents Harry Truman and Gerald Ford prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
If Britain and France had agreed to Hitler's proposal to export Europe's Jews under German occupation to a Jewish homeland in French Madagascar or even British Palestine, then the Jewish Holocaust might have been entirely avoided as well. Indeed, had Churchill and FDR supported the noble German resistance in their eighteen recorded attempts to overthrow or assassinate Hitler from 1938-1944 which enjoyed very high-level support by many of the most senior generals of the German Army (including at various times eleven different German Field Marshals including most notably Erwin Rommel), then World War Two might have been entirely avoided and Nazi Germany might have been liberated from Nazi rule without war. Unfortunately, these facts have been largely suppressed by liberal establishment historians who have largely succeeded in revising the record of actual history to further their ideological presuppositions. (This is part of what makes an unbiased study of history so exciting as it involves discovering truths, which are not widely recognized or accepted.)
New revelations have recently come to light that the Bush administration misled and manipulated this nation into an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of dead American soldiers against a country that posed it no threat. It is unfortunate that our leaders today continue in employing Wilson's and FDR's tactics of resorting to propaganda and lies to deceive the easily persuadable American people into supporting wars not in their national interest particularly when the primary affect of those wars is to further the cause and strengthen our most determined and dangerous enemies. America's leaders ignore the lessons of history at their peril.
This is the second part to my previous article, "Bush Repeating Mistakes of World War Two in Iraq"
December 26, 2005
