Mar.25

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Alan Dershowitz Goes Off the Rails... Again

We are not sure what is going on with Alan Dershowitz, who used to be a pretty brilliant fellow. We're not talking about his move from moderately liberal Democrat to MAGA Trumper—those kinds of shifts happen sometimes. We're talking about his propensity to say utterly nonsensical stuff, stuff that is completely at odds with reality, and that is entirely unsupported by evidence. Is he just hungry for attention? Is he trying to sell books/a podcast/whatever to the MAGA faithful? Is he suffering from cognitive decline? Could be any or all of these.

Yesterday, he was at it again. Trying to execute a tortured comparison between the regime that leads Iran, and the regime that led Nazi Germany, Dershowitz decreed:

This is the most important war since 1939, since Nazi Germany. If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear bombs, [the Ayatollah] will do what Hitler did, and there will be millions and millions of deaths. Had President Trump been in charge in 1935, 1936, I think the Holocaust would have been prevented. I think he would have gone in after Nazi Germany, he would have destroyed it, the way he is destroying Nazi Iran, and the Holocaust would have been prevented.

He also said that any American who does not support the war in Iran is only doing so because they are "putting partisanship before national security."

Let's start with the utter lunacy of describing anyone you don't like and that you regard as evil as a "Nazi." It's outrageously offensive, and it's also outrageously ahistorical. The Nazis were a specific political movement with a specific philosophy who put a specific program into action. No matter how bad you think the Iranian regime is, and they are very bad indeed, they are not Nazis and they are not fascists. What they are is hardcore theocrats, which is similar to Nazism in terms of being often extreme and often violent, but is very different in terms of where authority derives from (Hint: God) and what the proper role/function of the government and the citizenry is.

Of much greater importance, however, is Dershowitz' nonsensical claim that, if the leadership had been different, the Holocaust could have been avoided. He kind of handwaves away the chronology that he's proposing, at various points making reference to the mid-1930s, the late 1930s and World War II (which is 1939-45 for Europe; 1941-45 for the U.S.). But let's examine why he is wrong, regardless of whatever phase of the war you are talking about:

1. Phase I, 1935-38: This was when Nazi Germany was at its most vulnerable (at least, until the final collapse in 1945). Adolf Hitler assumed power as chancellor in late Jan. 1933 and führer in summer of 1934, and promptly got to work rebuilding the German war machine, which had been severely limited by the Treaty of Versailles. If ever there was an opportunity to nip Nazism in the bud, this was it.
   
   However, there are also some insurmountable problems, both logistical and political. Among the former is the fact that the U.S. military, like all of the world's militaries, was significantly smaller and significantly weaker than it had been in the late 1910s and 1920s, thanks to the budget-cutting made necessary by the Great Depression. It is true that the German army was also smaller and weaker than it would be a year or two later, but an invasion of Germany is no small thing, and the Germans would have been overwhelmingly likely to successfully defend their homeland.
   
   Politically, it would have been near-impossible for Franklin D. Roosevelt to rally the public behind such a move, or to get Congress to sign off (and remember, back then, presidents did not tend to initiate military invasions on their own authority). In the early years of his rule, Hitler was a fairly effective leader, and American media was full of articles lauding his efforts at getting the German economy going again and getting the German people back on their feet. The crimes against Jews and other groups did not get serious until the late 1930s, and the mass killing did not start until 1940. It also does not help matters that American culture was pretty antisemitic back then, and that even if the worst parts of the Holocaust had been underway by 1936 or 1937, and even if people believed the reports were not just lies/rumors/fantasies, much of the public would not have seen saving Jews as worth the necessary expenditure of blood and treasure.
   
   
2. Phase II, 1939-41: As of 1939, Hitler was officially a warmonger and an invader of other nations; by September of 1939, he was also formally at war with the U.K. and France.
   
   FDR recognized that, sooner or later, the U.S. would probably have to enter the conflict. And he got to work right away, deploying his legendary political skills as he tried to rally public sentiment for intervention. Even then, it took him 2 years to make the sale. It also remained the case that, until late 1941, the U.S. military was pretty anemic, and the majority of Americans did not see value in rescuing Jews (or even in rescuing Europe). On the other hand, the German military was vastly stronger. A U.S. vs. Germany conflict in, say, 1940 would likely have turned very ugly for the Americans.
   
   
3. Phase III, 1942-43/44: As of the end of 1941, of course, the U.S. formally entered World War II. Once the country had properly rearmed, which it did in late 1941 and the first half of 1942, FDR had his first plausible opportunity to try to end the Holocaust.
   
   That said, you have to really bend over backwards to get to "plausible," because pursuing that goal would have been exceedingly impractical. The first problem is that the more imminent threat to the U.S., at least before 1943, was Japan, and so they got the lion's share of attention. The second problem is that once the U.S. Army was present in Europe in meaningful numbers, there were some very troublesome obstacles between Allied forces and the concentration camps, which were predominantly in Germany and Poland (with one each in what had been, and would be again, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and France).
   
   The waters around Germany and its conquered possessions were teeming with U-boats, which the Allies could not track. There were vast fortifications along much of the coast of Europe. Italy was a viable target, but the mountains in the north are nearly impassible, even if you conquer the southern two-thirds of the boot. Greece/Bulgaria were tempting, and that's where Winston Churchill wanted to go ("the soft underbelly of Europe"), but Joseph Stalin made clear that was an unacceptable threat to his sovereignty, and that if the Brits and Americans tried it, he'd stop fighting the Nazis and start fighting the U.S. and the U.K. So, FDR and Churchill chose Italy, and it was slow going, until they ran into the mountains, after which it was basically no going.
   
   
4. Phase IV, 1944-45: Here's where the real opportunity to finally end the Holocaust came. The U.S. was as strong as it ever was during World War II, the Russians were on the march and pressuring Germany from the east, and the development of radar and sonar considerably reduced the threat posed by the U-boats. All of this is what made possible the invasion of northern France in June of 1944 (the progress of the Russians also made it necessary, as FDR and Churchill rightly suspected Stalin would keep control over any territory he "liberated" from the Germans).
   
   From June 1944 to May 8, 1945 (V-E Day), FDR could have made liberating the concentration camps a higher priority than he actually did. The President, with his generals in agreement, decided that more lives would be saved, in aggregate, if the U.S. dismantled the German war machine as rapidly as was possible, rather than trying to get behind enemy lines to liberate the camps. His decision in this regard was made a little bit easier by the fact that the very worst of the concentration camps—that is to say, the death camps like Treblinka, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau—were buried deep behind enemy lines (in Poland), and so would have been far more difficult to reach while German forces were still actively contesting the war.

In short, if FDR had made different choices, it might have been plausible to end the Holocaust a few months earlier, maybe even half a year earlier, although certainly at the cost of many American soldiers' lives. It is ridiculous to think that he could have ended it years earlier, much less a decade earlier. It is several orders of magnitude more ridiculous to think that Trump, who is endowed with a fraction of FDR's intelligence and his political skill, and who does not have a Congress dominated by his own political party, could have done it.

With all of this said, the purpose here is not to shred to pieces Dershowitz' dubious interpretation of history. That's just a bonus. It's really to highlight the mindset that has clearly taken hold among the MAGA war hawks—Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Dershowitz, etc. They have somehow persuaded themselves (or they always believed) that war is simply a matter of who has the biggest, swingingest dick, and the primary determinant of outcomes is whether or not the president has the will to actually use that dick.

If one indulges in this sort of thinking then it means, first of all, that there's no need for planning or other such annoyances. It also means that there's no need to build consensus around the war, since the leader has made his decision, and it's the duty of the people to fall in line—never mind that they might have legitimate reasons for their opposition.

Trump has already displayed this approach in his remarks about other presidents' wars. He arrogantly and ignorantly claimed that, if he'd been alive in the 1850s, he would have prevented the Civil War with his alleged dealmaking skills. He's also arrogantly and ignorantly claimed he could have done better with the Iraq War and with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oh, and he's also a fellow who said he could easily do better than Barack Obama did on Iran and, well, look where we are now.

This is the first time that the Trump mindset has been applied to a war that Trump is himself responsible for. He's not in the cheap seats anymore, he's front-row-center. This is why the joke we're seeing most often on social media these days (and we thank the readers who first brought it to our attention) goes like this: "What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iran War? Trump had a plan for getting out of Vietnam."

What is frightening is that if the people making the decisions don't get some humility, and some sense that no matter how powerful your military is there are limits to what you can do, then people will die. Lots of them. Just yesterday, Graham decreed that he would like to see the U.S. Marines invade Iran's Kharg Island: "We did Iwo Jima. We can do this. My money is always on the Marines." Undoubtedly, the Marines appreciate the well-deserved respect they are receiving here. However, Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, and it was fought well before the advent of modern missiles and drones. Graham is never going to be asked to put his life on the line, so of course he's willing to accept the risk here. But "Marines rule!" + "Well, we've done it before!" is lazy analysis, and is the kind of thinking that could lead to a bloodbath.

Surely, there has to be some adult in the room somewhere, right? Gen. Dan Caine? Secretary of State Marco Rubio? Someone? One can only hope they are able to step in and steer this situation before all the testosterone-fueled, wrong-side-of-40 bros, with their "If we can think it, we can do it" attitude, get a lot more people killed. (Z)