Excellent words. Invoking ‘Hitler’ in garden-variety political disputes has another side. It diminishes the nature of fascism, which was based on a highly developed German industrial economy, and the mass production of the most lethal weapons known to the world at the time. A third-rate dictatorship like Iraq under Hussein, whose infrastructure and economy had already been stripped by the Gulf War in 1991 and over a decade of U.N. sanctions, doesn’t have the resources to build and sustain a war machine like Hitler’s. Third world dictators are gruesome in their own right, but they are not the Furhur.

The Iraq war was sold to the American people based on the Bush/Cheney overestimation of Sadaam as an enemy. Overestimation of an enemy’s strength (and false rhetoric to 'prove' it) will lead to the wrong strategy and military action as assuredly as underestimation of the enemy’s strength. That’s why Bush’s claim that he was misled by intelligence reports is insidious. Only Bush and Blair overestimated Sadaam’s strength to the point of invasion.

Finally, use of a Hitler comparison is done at risk of belittling the sacrifice and deaths of 40,000,000 people on the East and Western fronts of a brutal advancing power and within the expanded German state’s death camps.