HITLER WAS GREAT? (in hindsight ... )

Imagine if a man or a woman, who genuinely has love in their heart, misleads their partner in an attempt to have a child. Their rationale is, “I will provide love and shelter. If everything goes well, in 40 years our wonderful child’s successes will be testimony enough to my wisdom.”

Does this make sense to you? If you’re the other partner, trapped into a marriage and/or life that you didn’t sign on for, things aren’t all that great. And then there is the primary assumption. What if things don’t turn out as planned? What if the love child turns out unloved and is forced to build a life around the deception and, now, distrust that their birth depended on?

Increasingly I’ve been seeing commentars using this kind logic to argue the following: “Since we don’t know what Baghdad and the Middle East will look like in 40 years we really can’t judge George W. Bush today.”

This “We can only judge him in 40 Years …” mind-set is really little more than an attempt to absolve collasal incompetence at a time when we need to dissect and learn from President Bush’s Blundering Wars Project, and his many other mistakes.

To be sure, I understand the argument. If democracy flourishes in the Middle East, we’re all better off. The ends justify the means. But democracy is not an “add water and stir” concoction. Anyone with an understanding of American Democracy knows this.

Moreover, if allowed to settle into our culture, this mind-set can be used to absolve wrong-doing and incompetence in other life areas. But more importantly it rests on an assumption that none of us can count on: Democracy flourishing in the Middle East. Which brings me to another level that this crazy line of thinking can bring us to.

If we can argue that destroying something so that others can rebuild it is good for mankind then Hitler was great for humanity. Think about it.

With what might be called another “audacious shake of the dice” (thank you Thomas L. Friedman) Adolf Hitler set in motion a series of events that led to the final collapse of imperial Europe and old style colonialism. The United States was forced to step in and clean up the mess but, as we know today, President Roosevelt, President Truman, and President Eisenhower were more than up to the task. So were the Europeans. The world also sought our leadership. Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and military alliances all speak to a cooperative global mind-set that ultimately made Hitler’s madness a source of opportunity.

There’s more to this story. But the key is, if we don’t take the time today to analyze and learn from the Bush administration’s incompetence and hubris, another 40 years will only lengthen our learning curve. More mistakes will be made. Historical Accidents (Hitler), like Historical Incompetence (Bush), provide much for us to learn from. Today.

No matter what the pundits are saying, we don’t need another 40 years to recognize and learn from failure.

- Mark