One of the things about travelling is that you often wind up reading newspapers that you don’t normally encounter. Thus it was that when I came down to breakfast at my hotel in Louisville, Colorado, the only newspaper available was MacPaper USA Today. I flipped to the op-ed page, and came across a spectacularly stupid piece by Peter Schweizer entitled Strategies or diversions? His thesis was that Bush’s strategy of invading Iraq rather than concentrating on al-Qaeda should be compared to Roosevelt’s decision to prioritize the defeat of Germany over that of Japan.
“With a logic that Bush would find familiar, FDR was lambasted by his critics for his WWII military strategy of defeating Germany first before focusing on Japan. They considered Germany a diversion. Wasn’t it Japan and not Germany that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor, asked Sens. Arthur Vandenberg and A.B. Chandler? One foreign minister called the idea ‘suicidal heresy’.”
The amazing thing is that he extends this argument over twelve paragraphs without once mentioning the fact that Hitler’s Germany was already engaged in bloody conflict all across Europe, and that as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. Let’s see….
- FDR: faced with two foes, both of which have declared war, both of which are killing Americans and allies: chooses a balanced, albeit controversial, strategy to defeat both.
- GWB: faced with an amorphous non-state opponent that has attacked the US, makes an incomplete stab at one related group (the Taleban in Afghanistan), and then invades another country (Iraq) that posed no threat to the US and had not been involved in the attack
Yup, that sounds comparable to me [sarcasm alert]. This Schweizer guy makes it sound as if Germany was peacefully minding its own business, leaving all of its neighbors alone, and when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suddenly took it into his head to put Tojo on the back-burner and lash out at Germany. What utter bollocks! Does the Hoover Institution really pay this idiot to write?