A Nuclear Fait Accompli: Taking the Nazi Road to War

 by Brian Melton  

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Ahmadinejad and his cronies in Iran appear to be literally following a path blazed in the Twentieth Century by Hitler.

“Fait accomplis must convince foreign powers of the hopelessness of intervention.”
– Adolf Hitler regarding a proposed invasion of Czechoslovakia, April 1938

Recently, Iran announced that it has once again begun to expand on its controversial uranium enrichment program.  It plans to vastly increase the number and quality of centrifuges in its plants, but once again assures the nations of the world that its intentions are entirely “peaceful.”  I feel certain that the worst the Iranians will face is another wild round of vicious report-writing at the U.N. and saber rattling by Bush and his allies.  In the end, Iran will most likely receive a strongly worded note, which it will pile with all the others it has received.  In practical terms, nothing will happen, the centrifuges will spin away with ever increasing efficiency to their “peaceful” end, and the West will continue to wander wistfully down a path that the Nazis led it down within some people’s living memory. 

I hate comparing anyone to the Nazis, even if they deserve it.  I try to avoid this for the simple reason that as everyone’s favorite (and well-deserved) object of all-embracing hatred, Hitler and his gang are the generic go-to negative analogy for any angry person or group.  People of all political persuasions, left and right, can agree that the Nazis were evil.  Period.  And so, calling someone a “Nazi” is automatically effective.  The target’s actual resemblance to the historic atrocity that was Nazism more often than not has nothing whatsoever to do with the charge.  It is simply a way of saying, “I really despise you and so want to make you look bad.”  As such, the comparison happens so often that most people settle for a shallow “You’re a really bad person” reading.  In most cases, they aren’t meant to dig deeper, because the speaker is rarely well enough educated about historic Germany to actually draw any such intelligent comparison.

In this case, though, I literally mean it.  Ahmadinejad and his cronies in Iran appear to be literally following a path blazed in the Twentieth Century by Hitler himself.  In those fateful years leading up to World War II, Hitler consciously attempted to follow a policy that could be reasonably broken down into four stages:

Stage 1:  Convince the world that your intentions are both reasonable and peaceful.  Hitler knowingly played on the liberal, peace-loving tendencies of his enemies.  Westerners tend to presume that everyone thinks like they do.  Ergo everyone is at heart a reasonable, peaceful individual, or at least will become one when given the chance and a proper example.  Hitler played on that by giving speeches to the Reichstag and press that could be the epitome of moderate, gracious thought:  he was only interested in providing for oppressed German minorities in his target countries.  He only wanted the right to build up Germany’s military to parity with other nations, and, in fact, to become an equal, contributing member of the international community.  He even proposed disarmament talks!  The West — particularly the liberals — ate it up.  The London Times actually intentionally suppressed the truth of Nazi atrocities in the pre-war period as a way of reaching out to Hitler and showing how open they were.

Stage 2:  Pursue your own policy behind the scenes.  That Hitler never had the slightest intention of honoring any of his promises is an indisputable historical fact.  Even as he was saying “Peace!” he was laying the groundwork for a huge military buildup that would far exceed even “parity” with the Allies.  He wanted power for a massive stroke that his targets would never be able to deflect.  Hitler had nothing but disgust for the “reasonable discourse” emanating from the West.  It interested him only insofar as it furthered his plans.

Stage 3:  Strike and accomplish your goal before your enemy can react.  Hitler’s plan called for a massive stroke that would end the fighting before it had fairly begun.  In Case Green, his plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he gave his generals “four days” to destroy the country’s resistance entirely.  In this, we can easily see the birth of the infamous blitzkrieg that would later prove so successful.  The idea, of course, is to succeed entirely before possible opponents can even think about intervening.

Stage 4:  Fait Accompli — Reassume a reasonable posture and bargain from your new position.  After achieving a goal, Hitler would again crank up Goebbels’s propaganda machine, claim that his aggression was somehow reasonably justifiable, and promise that he had no future plans for more expansion.  The Allies were left asking themselves if they really wanted to risk massive bloodshed to reverse something Hitler had already clearly realized.   They would then begin a new series of negotiations that took Nazi Germany’s new position for granted.

Of course, this approach never worked out in perfect order in real life, but it worked well enough and often enough for Hitler to take over the Rhineland, Austria, and all of Czechoslovakia while the Allies babbled pointlessly on about “a peace for our time.”  Unfortunately for Hitler, he took his last step in Poland a little too quickly and on September 1, 1939, inaugurated a war he never intended to start; a war he could not win.

It appears that Ahmadinejad is following in Hitler’s footsteps so closely he might as well as be wearing Der Fuehrer’s own jackboots.  Every “new” nuclear crisis we’ve seen from him so far has been Hitler’s approach in microcosm.  Iran talks peace, harmony, and reasonable rights while expanding their nuclear operation behind the scenes.  When a milestone is reached, Ahmadinejad announces it and immediately reassumes a “reasonable” stance.  After some complaint, an impotent U.N. (doing its best impression of the League of Nations) accepts Iran’s new position as fact and moves on.  While this has yet to involve military force (as Hitler’s plans called for), the basic pattern is the same.  I believe that the ultimate goal, of course, is a nuclear weapon. (Are we really naive enough to believe that a country with as many stated violent goals as Iran is really interested in just “energy?”  It appears so.).  In the meantime, behind the scenes, Iranian scientists are working nights bringing Iran closer to becoming a member of the nuclear club.  When that fateful day arrives and his generals can report to him that they have several nuclear weapons in their arsenal, Ahmadinejad will announce his big fait accompli to the world and dare them to do anything about it.  If the West is afraid to tackle a non-nuclear Iran, why should he believe that they will suddenly want to attack an atomic one?  The fait accompli may also be announced in a more dramatic way: a strike on Israel.

There is at least one more commonality between the two situations: the universal gullibility of the western liberal-intellectual elite.  What worked for Hitler seems to be working again for Ahmadinejad, and on the same people no less.  As I prepared to send this piece in, an article appeared on Breitbart:  "Obama calls for talks with Iran."  This strikes me as the saddest part of the business.  One would think we would learn after Der Fuehrer had pulled the wool over our collective eyes.  Yet here we are again, talking about giving way before another petty dictator, in all likelihood creating another military monster.  I wonder how many people will die in the name of “reasoned discourse” this time?

“Springtime for Hitler” indeed.

Foreign Affairs, National Defense

Read more articles by Brian Melton