I have quite a bit of respect of Pat Buchanan.  While I certainly don’t agree with everything he says, he has an important ability to speak hard truths that people don’t want to hear.  His Death of the West, for instance, struck me as a clear call to common sense (which is perhaps one reason why Washington has generally ignored it).  He regularly points out inconsistencies and shortcomings of both parties, and doesn’t give a fig about their opinions of him.    

As such, I have no doubt that Mr. Buchanan will not care in the least about what I’m about to say:  Buchanan’s criticism in his recent opinion article of Bush’s comparison of negotiating with Iran to appeasing the Nazis is unfortunately as incorrect as Mr. Buchanan’s own grasp of the history of World War II.  (I can only hope that his upcoming book on the “unnecessary war” is more accurate.)  While accusing Bush of “making a hash of history,” Buchanan is, in fact himself making something of an omelet.

It isn’t my purpose to respond to Buchanan, point by point.  Nor do I want to.  Buchanan’s basic idea that we should use a combination of diplomacy, international pressure, and justified war is sound.  I will be focusing on three aspects:  His accusation that Bush is “playing the Hitler card,” his estimation of Hitler, and what this might mean for a comparison to Ahmadinejad.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, there are inherent dangers in comparing anyone to the Nazis.  Most people will brush it off as simply another way of saying “I think X is a really bad person/thing.”  The rest won’t believe you mainly because we’ve traditionally demonized the Nazis (understandably so) to such an extent that they no longer seem human.  After all, no mere homo sapien could ever be as evil as the creatures residing in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.  So, on the practical side of things, Bush (or more precisely his speechwriters) should have come up with a more effective comparison. 

On the other hand, the association is probably much stronger in terms of real history than Mr. Buchanan seems to believe, and that has to do with my second point:  Mr. Buchanan’s misunderstanding of who Hitler was and what he wanted.

Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. … From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig [a port city primarily of German ethnicity split off from Germany in 1919 to give Poland access to the sea]. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.

Mr. Buchanan’s claims about Hitler’s interest in negotiations are based on observations of Hitler’s rhetoric and do not demonstrate any real knowledge of Hitler’s actual intentions.  Mr. Buchanan is, in fact, falling for a Nazi publicity stunt that apparently is still effective fifty years on.  (To remedy this, he might look at some of the captured Nazi secret documents available from various sources as far back as William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  More recent excellent sources include Ian Kershaw’s two volume biography of Hitler, Richard Evans’ two volumes on the Third Reich, or Norman Rich’s, Hitler’s War Aims.)  Hitler exploited the West’s assumption that everyone is basically reasonable by adopting a moderate stance publically.  In private, as far back as the Anschluss, Hitler had in fact prepared for and wanted war.  By the time the Danzig question came up, he was positively spoiling for a fight.  There was no question of if there would be war with Hitler, but merely when.  In fact, he made it clear to his inner circle and foreign policy team that he never had much intention of negotiating with the Poles.  Instead, he planned to press them so hard on Danzig that they would not be able to agree, thereby creating an excuse to go to war.  Also, despite what Mr. Buchanan implies, failure to negotiate over Danzig didn’t push Hitler unwillingly into Stalin’s open arms.  Since Hitler already wanted war, the alliance with the Soviets merely altered his plans, it didn’t dictate them.

As for the unrest in Danzig itself, which Mr. Buchanan seems to think was natural, the Nazis played a pivotal role in stirring it up to begin with, as they had in the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland.  Hitler wanted to create the impression of masses of oppressed German people begging for the Nazis to invade and “liberate” them.  This approach worked on Chamberlain up until Czechoslovakia, and it apparently still works on Mr. Buchanan.

So it seems that Mr. Buchanan apparently doesn’t understand Hitler’s mentality (or psychosis, if you prefer).  He essentially expects that Hitler would have acted rationally.  I believe that in his article Mr. Buchanan is misreading Ahmadinejad’s radical Islamic mindset in a similar way.  We are, after all, talking about a national leader who is a confirmed believer in bringing about the apocalypse, and has said that the “Hidden Imam” is already active in Iranian politics.  He denies the Holocaust, threatens/predicts the imminent doom of an entire nation, and is conveniently charging ahead pell-mell with his own nuclear program.  I somehow doubt that Mr. Buchanan will find Ahmadinejad’s ultimate demands to be any more “reasonable” than Hitler’s were.

I fear that in this case Bush may be precisely right.  Ahmadinejad will probably treat any real attempt at two-sided diplomacy as Hitler did:  mainly as something to be exploited.  Real negotiations must by definition begin with the assumption that both parties are willing to give something up.  Without that granted, one does not “negotiate,” he “dictates.”  To the mind of a crusading tyrant, giving ground is often seen as a sign of weakness.  It encourages further demands and promotes the flippant attitude that foreign powers are too morally weak to intervene forcefully.  There is a very real possibility that negotiating with Iran, even from what the West perceives as a position of power, may very well end up undermining the peace rather than encouraging it, as it did with Hitler.