ASHINGTON - The aggressive new campaign by
the administration of President George W Bush to depict US foes in
the Middle East as "fascists" and its domestic critics as
"appeasers" owes a great deal to steadily intensifying efforts by
the right-wing press over the past several months to draw the same
comparison.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Network and the Weekly Standard,
as well as the Washington Times, which is controlled by the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, and the neo-conservative New
York Sun, have consistently and with increasing frequency framed the
challenges faced by Washington in the region in the context of the
rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, according to a search of
the Nexis database.
All of those outlets, as well as two other
right-wing US magazines - the National Review and The American
Spectator - far outpaced their commercial rivals in the
frequency of their use of keywords and names such as
"appeasement", "fascism" and "Hitler", particularly with respect
to Iran and its controversial president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
For example, Nexis cited 56 uses of "Islamofascist" or "Islamofascism"
in separate programs or segments aired by Fox News, compared
with 24 by CNN, over the past year. Even more striking, the same
terms were used in 115 different articles or columns in the
Washington Times, compared with only eight in the Washington
Post over the same period, according to a breakdown by Nexis.
Similarly, the Washington Times used the words "appease" or
"appeasement" - a derogatory reference to efforts by British
prime minister Neville Chamberlain to avoid war with Nazi
Germany before the latter's invasion of Poland - in 25 different
articles or columns that dealt with alleged threats posed by
Ahmadinejad, compared with six in the Post and only three in the
New York Times.
Israel-centered neo-conservatives and other hawks have long
tried to depict foreign challenges to US power as replays of the
1930s in order to rally public opinion behind foreign
interventions and high defense budgets and against domestic
critics.
During the Cold War, they attacked domestic critics of the
Vietnam War and later the Ronald Reagan administration's "Contra
war" against Nicaragua - and even Israel's 1982 invasion of
Lebanon - as "isolationists" and "appeasers" who failed to
understand that their opposition in effect served the interests
of an "evil" Soviet Union whose ambitions for world conquest
were every bit as threatening and real as those of the Axis
powers in World War II.
Known as "the Good War", the conflict against Germany and Japan
remains irresistible as a point of comparison for hawks caught
up in more recent conflicts - from the first Gulf War when
former president George H W Bush compared Iraq's Saddam Hussein
to Adolf Hitler; to the Balkan wars when neo-conservatives and
liberal interventionists alike described Serbian leader Slobodan
Milosevic in similar terms; to the younger Bush's "global war on
terrorism" (GWOT), which he and his supporters have repeatedly
tried to depict as the latest in a series of existential
struggles against "evil" and "totalitarians" that began with
World War II.
Given the growing public disillusionment in the US not only with
the Iraq war but with Bush's handling of the larger GWOT as well
- not to mention the imminence of the mid-term congressional
elections in November and the growing tensions with
Ahmadinejad's Iran over its nuclear program - it is hardly
surprising that both the administration and its hawkish
supporters are trying harder than ever to identify their current
struggles, including last month's conflict between Israel and
Iran-backed Hezbollah, specifically with the war against
"fascism" more than 60 years ago.
As noted by the Associated Press (AP) this week, "fascism" or
"Islamic fascism", a phrase used by Bush himself two weeks ago
and used to encompass everything from Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda
and Hamas to Shi'ite Hezbollah and Iran to secular Syria, has
become the "new buzzword" for Republicans.
In a controversial speech on Tuesday, Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld was even more direct, declaring that Washington faced a
"new type of fascism" and, in an explicit reference to the
failure of Western countries to confront Hitler in the 1930s,
assailing critics for neglecting "history's lessons" by "believ(ing)
that somehow vicious extremists can be
appeased".
But Rumsfeld's remarks, which drew bitter retorts from leading
Democrats, followed a well-worn path trod with increasing
intensity by the neo-conservative and right-wing media over the
past
