The Munich Analogy Does Not Hold Up This Time

If you really want to attack somebody and you can't come up with any convincing reasons, your best tactic is to accuse your opponents of being appeasers who are planning another Munich.
Which is why U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken to comparing himself to Winston Churchill. He was at it again in a speech last Tuesday in California, telling 3,000 Marines that "it wasn't until each country got attacked that they said: 'Maybe Winston Churchill was right. Maybe that lone voice expressing concern about what was happening was right'." The Lone Defense Secretary's message was clear. Saddam Hussein is another Adolf Hitler, and if he is not stopped now, he and his weapons of mass destruction will gobble up one country after another. Next thing you know, the Iraqi hordes will be casting lascivious eyes on the United States itself.
Rumsfeld couldn't be that far off his trolley? Try this gem, from the previous week: "Think of all the countries that said, well, we don't have enough evidence. Mein Kampf had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to do. Maybe he won't attack us. Maybe he won't do this or that. Well, there were millions dead because of the miscalculations." As there presumably will be again if America doesn't destroy Saddam now.
So let's explore this analogy a bit. Hitler's Germany in 1933 was the second-biggest industrial country in the world: a scientific and technological leader in the heart of Europe with a fairly homogeneous population of about 80 million people. In only six years Hitler gobbled up all or bits of three countries, and was starting in on Poland when Britain and France finally went to war to stop him. (The United States remained neutral for over two more years).
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, by contrast, is only the fourth-biggest country in the Middle East. Industrially and scientifically, it ranks about fortieth in the world, and its population of just over 20 million people is deeply divided into mutually hostile Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs. Saddam Hussein has been running the place for decades, and in that time he has conquered nobody.