The attack by Saudi citizens on the World Trade Center represented a despicable crime.

Nonetheless, their crime, like Timothy McVeigh’s, hardly merits wars on expanding lists of enemies or potential enemies. The attack on the World Trade Center has been followed by a war on Afghanistan and Iraq and a long military occupation of Iraq. The perpetrator of the crimes of Sept. 11 has not been found. The Taliban is regaining its power. War or the threat of war has now spread throughout the Middle East. The president tells us that terminating the occupation of Iraq before our aims are achieved will only open us to further terrorism on our own shores. His speeches are rife not only with misleading comparisons to World War II but also with a misunderstanding of that conflict that has long had tragic implications for American foreign policy.

The notion of al-Qaida as a uniquely dangerous threat to the U.S. should carry little weight for those of us who are middle aged or older. We remember hiding under school desks in the ’50s while the Soviets tested hydrogen bombs or ICBMs. No terrorist, even with a suitcase nuke, could wreak even half of Katrina’s destruction, let alone wipe out our civilization.

The effort to translate Osama into a modern Hitler or Stalin would not survive even casual scrutiny were it not for two distinctive features of our political culture. Expansive and misleading uses of the Hitler analogy did not start with President Bush. Indeed, they were a staple of political discourse – often bipartisan – from ’40s accusations that the US “loss” of China presaged dangers to the rest of Southeast Asia to even more inflamed accusations that defeat in Vietnam would eventually lead to attacks on California. On the domestic front, left and union critiques of the corporate order were treated as communist-inspired.

Today’s rhetoric of “Islamo-Fascism” is especially compelling because it emerges from and reinforces a heroic reading of U.S. foreign policy. The nation Puritans celebrated as a “City Upon a Hill” is being refashioned for the 21st century, where U.S. obligations are seen as global. Such refashioning seems especially important amid the turmoil and insecurity that corporate globalism has inflicted and the end of the Cold War. Treating all domestic and international dissent as inspired by uniquely destructive and evil men can ease doubts about core national values during periods of rapid social change.

That Hitler’s acts were evil and had to be stopped by military means is disputed by few, but the current portrayals of the era are curiously a-historical. Lost in today’s renditions are the role of U.S. corporations in arming Hitler’s war machine, the place that the draconian peace terms enacted by France, Britain and the U.S. after World War I had in stimulating xenophobia in Germany, and capitalism’s near collapse in the ’30s. Virulent nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism had long and ugly histories in Europe, but U.S. policy, practices and institutions were far from innocent and above reproach.

Likewise today, “rogue states” like Iran and freelance terrorists have access to nuclear materials and technologies because the U.S. generously encouraged “allies” like the Shah of Iran to go nuclear and U.S. firms exported nuclear technologies.

If there is a domino effect today, it lies in the cascade of events flowing from the self-fulfilling belief that radical Islamists inspire all resistance to U.S. policy. Islam, like other religions of the book, has always had its fundamentalist, authoritarian, anti-modern interpreters. Nonetheless, attacking and occupying Iraq on grounds of its connection to al-Qaida at the same time the U.S. treats all critics of its Palestinian policies as inspired by radicals lends credibility to the latter’s charge that the U.S. is engaged in civilizational war against all Muslims.

One consequence of this obsession is the conversion of Iraq into a haven for more terrorism. In addition, it strengthens the most extreme and militaristic elements in Iran. Finally, in a tragic Catch-22, Iran’s belligerence is taken as proof of the cancer’s further spread and is now being used as an argument to expand military efforts in the region. U.S. or Israeli nuclear bombardment of Iran could unleash further devastation and instability in the region. The moral and economic costs could mount exponentially.

The Democrats taking over key congressional defenses and foreign policy committee chairs cannot directly change U.S. Middle East policy. Nonetheless, they can push for a sense of the Congress resolution that no military action be taken against Iran without full congressional hearings and a declaration of war. And just as important, rather than dwell on questions of administration manipulation of WMD data, something in which many Democrats and the mass media were at least in part complicit, more attention should be devoted to how the current occupation of Iraq, opposed by 80 percent of Iraq’s people, can be ended as quickly as possible.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers may contact him at jbuell@acadia.net.