What Does History Have to Say About the Persian Gulf? (November 1990 | Volume: 41, Issue: 7)

What Does History Have to Say About the Persian Gulf?

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Authors: Fredric Smoler

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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November 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 7

Men and women achieve historical perspective by making analogies. The old tag that we “remember the future and invent the past” suggests the hazards of this procedure; it admonishes us not to forget that the lessons of history are all too likely to be a series of projected misunderstandings. Anyone seeking those lessons runs the danger of being capriciously selective, self-serving, and sentimental. It is also easy to see the future as nothing more than mindless repetitions of the past; a Superman comic of my boyhood featured jet cars that looked wonderfully like levitating, betail-finned Cadillacs of the time. In fact, the futures we “remember” are unlikely to resemble much the one we are actually stumbling toward. Still, analogy is all we have, and when we find ourselves in urgent national difficulties, historical analogies proliferate.

THE MUNICH ANALOGY

The Kuwait crisis has been especially productive of such analogies, most of them to the diplomatic history of the 1930s. The Munich analogy—recalling the Allies’ appeasement of Germany over its demands on Czechoslovakia in 1938—has been cited again and again, and this is understandable: Saddam Hussein’s sequence of actions has been eerily evocative of Hitler’s, and the unprecedented unity he has evoked in the council of nations is a testament to the power of the Munich analogy for the last generation that genuinely remembers the 1930s and that now rules the industrial societies of the West.

The parallels are impressive: first the assertion of a provocation, not completely unreasonable to some in the audience (the supposed plight of the Sudeten Germans/Kuwait’s cheating on OPEC oil quotas), then the limited demand (the cession of the Sudetenland/strict adherence to quotas and a new benchmark price), then the abandonment of the small nation by its allies (in this case the Saudis and Gulf Cooperation Council forsaking Kuwait as the British and French did Czechoslovakia), the concessions, the apparent resolution of the crisis through appeasement, the solemn vows, the arrant lies, and finally the brutal, outrageous conquest.

The analogy works at least through the establishment of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the 1939 pact negotiated between Germany and the Soviet Union by Ribbentrop and Molotov. If we go to war to defend a feudal, authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia, the analogy will still be working: The Allies finally fought for the sovereignty of fascistoid Poland, not for the democratic Czechs. The Kuwaiti Emir scarcely deserves the comparison with the Czechs, but he did preside over what was by local standards an uncharacteristically humane and tolerant regime.

The unprecedented vigor of the response is a tribute to the vitality of the Munich analogy, which seemed to have been destroyed by systematic overuse: Civil wars in Vietnam, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, Argentine aggression in the Falklands, even the loss of elections by American protégés in the Dominican Republic and Chile could summon up that infinitely elastic analogy. But if the analogy had become stale with too-broad