Iraq and the Lessons of History.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

Judging by the rhetorical battle over the putative lessons of history during the run-up to the war in Iraq, George Orwell's famous dictum resonates today more than ever. If President Bush manages to convince the world that the war was necessary to avoid even worse consequences, a repeat of the disastrous appeasement polices of the 1930s that only encouraged Hitler, then he can emerge morally vindicated. But if the critics can keep much of the world convinced that this is a case, like Vietnam, of American imperial overreach, it will be a public-relations nightmare. A lot--an awful lot--depends on which historical analogy gains popular acceptance.

History can be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as governments and others see fit. There are no perfect historical analogies; each situation is different and has to be judged on its own merits. That said, history is the only guide we have to the possible consequences of our actions, and it deserves careful scrutiny, both in terms of what happened in the past and what might have happened differently. It doesn't provide a road map, to borrow a term from the Mideast discussion, but it can help. And it's always a mistake to dismiss the debate over history as a purely intellectual exercise. The implications are practical and sometimes immediate.

The most frequently invoked analogy involves Saddam Hussein and Hitler or Stalin. In its crudest form, it equates the three leaders--and that is simply wrong. Although Saddam relied on wholesale terror and killing to maintain power, there's a fundamental disproportion of scale here. It in no way whitewashes Saddam's bloody record to point out that he's not in the same league as the other two. To do otherwise risks trivializing the horrors inflicted by the worst monsters of the last century.

But if that's understood, there are legitimate grounds for drawing conclusions from the rise of Hitler in particular. Bush administration officials have argued that inaction on Iraq would have been more catastrophic than the war. While they emphasize the 1930s, others point to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which no one intervened. Writing in The Washington Post on the eve of the current war, Richard Sezibera, Rwanda's ambassador to the United States, urged the international community "to learn from its mistakes" by ...