History does repeat itself if only closely

[thedrifter]

By Thomas Sowell
>January 30, 2003
>
>Disarming a country
>
>
>History does not literally repeat itself, but sometimes it comes awfully
>close. Iraq is not the first dangerous dictatorship that international
>agreements tried to keep disarmed. Nor is it the first where that effort
>failed.
>
>
>Back in the 1930s, Germany's military forces were limited by a ban on
>conscription, by limitations on the number and kinds of weapons it could
>have, and by a requirement that it station no troops in its own
>industrialized Rhineland. These requirements were in the treaty of
>Versailles, which ended the First World War.
>
>
>Demilitarizing the Rhineland was perhaps the crucial provision of these
>international restrictions.
>
>
>Germany's population and industrial might, together with its strong
>military traditions and its aggressive policies which had brought on the
>First World War, made it the most dangerous nation on the continent of
>Europe. But it could not attack any other nation when its own industrial
>heartland was undefended and therefore could be quickly seized by French
>troops, who were just across the Rhine.
>
>
>Like Saddam Hussein today, Hitler at first pretended to go along with these
>restrictions, all the while clandestinely building up his military forces.
>However, this was clandestine only in the sense that the general public did
>not know about it. British intelligence was well aware of what he was doing
>and kept the Prime Minister informed.
>
>
>The real question was whether Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted to be
>the one to break the bad news to the British public or whether he would
>keep quiet, get re-elected, and pass the problem on to his successors -- as
>Bill Clinton would do in a later era. Baldwin did a Clinton.
>
>
>In later years, Stanley Baldwin tried to justify his inaction:
>
>
>"Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming,
>and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy
>would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything
>that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more
>certain."
>
>
>But this was not just Baldwin's failure or that of his Conservative Party.
>The Liberal Party in 1935 demanded "clear proof" of a need for rearmament
>against the Nazis, much as many in politics and the media today are
>demanding "clear proof" of a need to act against Saddam Hussein.
>
>
>Meanwhile the Labour Party was advocating disarmament and innumerable
>groups were promoting international agreements and diplomatic exchanges as
>a substitute for military power. Diplomatic agreements and arms limitations
>treaties proliferated throughout the whole period between the two World
>Wars.
>
>
>None of this had any practical effect, except to lull the Western
>democracies into inaction while Germany and Japan rapidly built up their
>military forces.
>
>
>Hitler began openly violating the restrictions put on Germany, one at a
>time, allowing him to gauge what reaction there would be among the Western
>powers and in the League of Nations. Each violation that he got away with
>led him to try another -- and then another.
>
>
>The key violation -- without which he would not be able to wage war -- was
>moving German troops into the Rhineland in 1936, in open defiance of the
>treaty of Versailles. Both he and his generals knew that the French army
>was so overwhelmingly more powerful at this point that German troops would
>not have been able to put up even token resistance if France sent its
>troops in to oust them.
>
>
>France did nothing. It was the first of many nothings that France did in a
>series of crises that led up to World War II.
>
>
>When Hitler had built up his clandestine forces sufficiently, he simply
>stopped keeping them secret and confronted the West with enough power that
>he knew they would not dare to challenge him. The opportunity to stop him
>was past.
>
>
>Those who wanted "clear proof" now had it. In just a few years, they would
>have even clearer proof when the Nazis invaded France and subjugated it in
>just six weeks -- and then began bombing London, night after night.
>
>
>While history does not literally repeat itself, sometimes it comes very
>close.
>
>
> ?2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.



Sempers,

Roger