This is the most important task of our president: to know when to send troops into harm's way. World War II was unavoidable, but Vietnam, Iraq, Panama, the Bay of Pigs and a host of other foreign entanglements were all hubris, not national security.
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Just as a professional surgeon knows when to operate (or not), which operation to perform, what the purpose is and how to explain this to the patient and family, great national leaders know when to go to war, when not to, how to pursue an unavoidable war, what the goal is and how to rally the forces. He was also proud when I refused the physician draft during Vietnam and agreed to alternative service instead. My recently departed dad was proud of being a veteran of World War II. But as the American journalist Oswald Garrison Villard said, "What was criminal in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw and London has now become heroic in Dresden and now Tokyo." The hypocritical bombing of German civilians as punishment for the Holocaust was excessive and irrelevant.
I suppose some Allies believed that the Germans deserved to see their cities burn after the blitzing of England and atrocities on the eastern front. I for one still believe in the "good German," and question the wisdom and morality of such a policy, through which innocent Germans who may have even been opposed to Hitler's wartime leadership were indiscriminately made to suffer, even though they played no active role in the Holocaust apart from voting the Nazis into power in 1933. I was bothered by Christopher Hitchens's comment that the horrors of the Final Solution somehow retroactively justified the Allies' carpet-bombing of German cities. As for a few conservative British revisionists, have they read "Mein Kampf" and given serious thought to what Hitler said about his approach to lying? Anyone or any nation that dealt with Hitler and did not take him seriously on that point came to regret it. Yet he remains the towering figure in the attempt to stop the spread of fascism's most virulent form, Nazism. Historians have studied the second world war as more information has become available and revised some of their thinking in the process they have discovered a flawed Churchill. At least I am grateful that NEWSWEEK published Christopher Hitchens's review of "a book that stinks." One has to wonder whether Buchanan really is as abysmally ignorant of German history as NEWSWEEK made him appear, or if he counts on his readers' being too ill-informed to understand that they are being victimized. in history and nearly 40 years of college-level experience teaching modern European and British history, I find it disheartening to learn that not only has Pat Buchanan written a book with a wrongheaded thesis, but someone actually published it and many people are buying it.
The result was that the total of the "lesser evils" added up precisely to that greater evil they had hoped to escape.Īs a veteran of three campaigns in Europe (1944–45), with a Ph.D.
And his own opponents within Germany believed that by swallowing the small doses of National Socialism that were offered to them in the beginning, they would be able to avoid the greater evil later on. Perhaps there is such a thing as a necessary war, but all war is evil."Ĭhristopher Hitchens, in his masterful review of Pat Buchanan's revisionist book "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" ("A War Worth Fighting," June 23), makes the point that the "Nazis could and should have been confronted before they had fully rearmed and had begun to steal the factories … and workers of neighboring countries." What he fails to mention is that even people in other parts of Europe were to some extent captivated by National Socialism, which explains why Western leaders were reluctant to deal with Hitler during the first few years of his rule, when he was weak militarily. But a veteran rebutted Hitchens's claim that it was a "good war": "There is no such thing as a good war. One reader said Thomas "rightfully balances the positive aspects of appeasement with the negative components of diplomatic aggression." Many concurred with Christopher Hitchens's criticism of Pat Buchanan's new book questioning the necessity of World War II. 'What Would Winston Do?' Readers endorsed Evan Thomas's take on the legacy of Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.
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