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The Anschluss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Alex Danchev
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Extract

Historical analogies

On 2 August 1990, much to everyone's surprise, Hitler invaded Kuwait. The ensuing conflict was mired in history—as Francis Fukuyama might say—or at least in historical analogy. The ruling analogy was with the Second World War; more exactly, with the origins and nature of that war. George Bush's constant reference during the Second Gulf War was Martin Gilbert's Second World War, a monumental construction well described as ‘a bleak, desolate evocation of the horrors of war, a modern Waste Land, an unremitting catalogue of killing, atrocity and exiguous survival’. The paperback edition of this exacting volume weighs three pounds. The text runs to 747 pages. Understandably, the President stashed his copy on board Air Force One. ‘I'm reading a book’, he informed an audience in Burlington, Vermont, in October 1990, ‘and it's a book of history, a great, big, thick history of World War II, and there's a parallel between what Hitler did to Poland and what Saddam Hussein has done to Kuwait’. As Paul Fussell has reminded us, the wartime refrain was Remember Pearl Harbor. “ ‘No one ever shouted or sang Remember Poland’? Not until 1990, that is. Of course, Bush himself had served in that war, as he was not slow to remind the electorate: he flew fifty-eight missions as a pilot in the Pacific. For those who wondered what he knew of Poland, Gilbert's book—at once a chronicle of remembrance and an indictment—told him this:

Type
Review Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1994 , pp. 97 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1994

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References

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8 Quoted in Massing, ‘Way to War’.

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27 Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, p. 438. See also pp. xxix–xxxv and 73–6.

28 From ‘The Theory of Limited War’, in Alex Danchev and Dan Keohane (eds.), International Perspectives on the Gulf Conflict 1990–1991 (forthcoming). Cf. Freedman and Karsh, Gulf Conflict, pp. 438–9.

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