[R-G] Neocons paint Putin as modern-day Hitler

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_5161.shtml

Neocons paint Putin as modern-day Hitler
By Daniel Luban
Updated Sep 2, 2008, 03:13 pm

WASHINGTON (IPS/GIN) - Just days after the outbreak of war between  
Russia and Georgia, the debate in Washington over how to view the  
crisis historically became nearly as contentious as the debate over  
how to respond to it politically.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
Photo: MGN Online
Prominent neoconservatives and other foreign policy hawks portrayed  
Russia’s offensive into Georgia as an echo of 1930s Nazi expansionism— 
an interpretation that has been hotly contested by a number of  
liberals and conservative realists.

But the question of what sort of concrete action the U.S. should take  
in the Caucasus has proved far messier, as both camps remain split  
about the proper response to the Russian offensive.

Since Aug. 12, when Russia sent troops into the restive Georgian  
region of South Ossetia, neoconservatives in the U.S. compared Russian  
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler, and the Russian  
incursion with Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland.

“The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against  
Georgia are not very important,” began a column in the Washington Post  
by prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project  
for a New American Century. “Do you recall the precise details of the  
Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia?”

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s famously unsuccessful  
attempt to appease Mr. Hitler by ceding the Sudetenland in the 1938  
Munich Agreement has become a central reference of neoconservative  
foreign policy doctrine. “Appeasement,” “Munich,” and Prime Minister  
Chamberlain’s name itself are often taken as code words signifying the  
ineffectiveness of compromise and diplomacy—and the necessity of  
military force—in dealing with the U.S.’s enemies.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain also seemed to be  
alluding to the lessons of Munich in a Aug. 12 speech. Mr. McCain  
claimed that the U.S. had “learned at great cost the price of allowing  
aggression against free nations to go unchecked.”

Mr. McCain is advised by Mr. Kagan and joined him in proposing a  
League of Democracies to counter powers such as Russia and China.

At a panel held Aug. 13 at the right-wing American Enterprise  
Institute in Washington, Munich analogies abounded.

Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and prominent foreign  
policy hawk, mocked the Aug. 13 peace agreement between Russia and  
Georgia brokered by French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

“President Sarkozy has landed in Paris holding in his hand a piece of  
paper guaranteeing peace in our time,” Mr. Peters said, eliciting  
widespread laughter from the audience. Once again, the reference was  
to a statement of Prime Minister Chamberlain’s following the Munich  
conference.

Mr. Peters ended his remarks by making the Putin-Hitler analogy  
explicit.

The Hitler and Chamberlain analogies have long been staples of  
neoconservative rhetoric, but their application to the situation in  
Georgia has triggered a backlash.

Joe Klein, a prominent centrist political pundit who has become  
involved in a series of rancorous disputes with neoconservatives in  
recent months, mocked Robert Kagan’s use of the Sudetenland analogy.  
“When a column begins like this … the author has got to be a  
neoconservative pushing for the next war,” he wrote in a blog post  
entitled “It’s Raining Nazis.”

Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, advocated U.S.  
assistance to the Georgian regime in the National Interest, a journal  
which is today known as a bastion of foreign policy realism. But Mr.  
Simes urged policymakers to “disregard the hysterical diatribes of  
(Georgian President Mikheil) Saakashvili’s American champions, who  
protest too much—perhaps because their irresponsible encouragement of  
the Georgian president was a contributing factor on the road to the  
war.”

At the American Enterprise Institute panel, Mr. Peters was blistering  
in his criticism of the U.S. response to the war but stopped short of  
calling for direct military action. He recommended measures such as  
expelling Russia from the G-8 and World Trade Organization and  
revoking Russia’s right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.