Exaggerating the Threat

Conservatives rightly criticize leftists and their allies in the press for fear-mongering and creating phony crises over trivial or non-existent problems. Indeed, it is probably an essential and necessary part of left wing strategy to do so, since confident, independent people are less likely to want a powerful, maternalistic government running their lives. However, leftists are not the only people in government who have agendas, and the Bush Administration and some of its supporters have been engaged in some counterproductive hyperbole of their own in regard to the war on terror. The danger from Islamic terrorists and fanatics is real and serious, but it does the country no good to exaggerate it. In particular it is absurd to equate it to the menace of the Nazis and Communists in the 20th Century.
Nazi Germany was a powerful, technologically advanced state, ruled by fanatics with a murderous and evil ideology and a desire for world mastery. It created brutal and effective armies that overran most of Europe before America even entered the war. Its scientists and engineers were world leaders in many areas. It was a German scientist, not an American, who first discovered nuclear fission. Nazi Germany and the other axis powers were a direct threat to the survival of both the United States and civilization, and it took the bloodiest war in human history to defeat them.
The Soviet Union was a vast continental empire, ruled by vicious men with a murderous and evil ideology and a desire for world mastery. It possessed a large and deliverable arsenal of nuclear weapons that on any day during the last decades of the Cold War could have devastated the United States and killed millions of its citizens. It ruled Eastern and much of Central Europe, and had large and well-developed military technologies and industries. It deployed the largest modern army in the world in the middle of Europe and trained it to overrun the rest of the continent in a blitzkrieg. It supported wars and insurrections and created client states around the globe. In the United States and Western Europe, it was aided by an effective Fifth Column of spies, traitors, and sympathizers. The Soviet Union and its empire were a direct threat to the survival of both the United States and civilization, and it took a great and long Cold War to defeat them.
To put things in very clear perspective, consider the world situation in the summer of 1940. Throughout the 1930’s the most powerful military force of any nation outside the Nazi and Communist realms (and the supposed bulwark against Nazi expansion ) was the French Army. Yet in about six weeks in the late spring and early summer of 1940, the Germans had destroyed that army completely and demonstrated that theirs was the most powerful army on earth. At that point, the Nazis were masters of Europe. The Soviet Union, with the world’s second most powerful army, was their partner and de facto ally. Italy was an active ally and belligerent. Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and half of Poland were under German occupation. Spain, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, and most of the Balkan states were friendly neutrals. In Asia Japan, a German ally, had the world’s third strongest army and its most powerful and deadly fleet and was slowly expanding its empire by conquering the richest and most productive parts of China. Against all of that, there was only the British Empire with a great navy and a powerful air force but a weakened and defeated army and, in the wings – neutral and uncommitted - the United States with a navy that, though large and first rate, was not yet adequate to defend both oceans and with almost no army at all.
That was a crisis of civilization. What we have now is a problem with some despicable terrorists and some technologically and culturally primitive outlaw states beyond the periphery of civilization, states that surely don’t need to be allowed to get even a few atomic weapons. There is a difference, and honesty and good sense require that members and supporters of the Administration refrain from exaggeration and avoid crying wolf in ways that make them seem silly. Then the country can have a rational debate on how to deal with the actual threats.