GWB & JFK

MANY PEOPLE HAVE NOTICED similarities between our dealings with Iraq today and with Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis. Castro and Saddam are volatile, dangerous tyrants we had hoped the locals would get rid of, with some help from their friends. But it didn't work out that way; the Bay of Pigs and the post-Gulf War Kurd and Shiite uprisings were two of the worst moments in modern American history. Free peoples underestimate the power of tyrants to squash their internal enemies like lice. From D-Day onward, the Allies breathlessly anticipated that Germany might do away with Hitler at any moment; in the event, Hitler did away with Germany. Saddam might be drawn to the same maneuver.

Both in Cuba and in Iraq, a dangerous dictator got hold of dangerous weapons--although in Cuba the weapons were Soviet, which made a big difference. It made the crisis more dangerous but more manageable, because Khrushchev in the end did not want to see mankind obliterated, and Saddam doesn't seem to care one way or the other. Both times we considered and rejected an immediate military strike. Both times we took our case to the United Nations--although in 1962 we did so after the U.S. Navy had already set up the Cuban blockade, because (according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., adviser and court historian to JFK) the administration "saw no hope of mustering enough votes in the U.N. to authorize action against Cuba in advance." In the Security Council, Kennedy's U.N. representative Adlai Stevenson answered the inevitable blowhards who claimed that the United States had (as usual) gone off half-cocked: "Were we to do nothing until the knife was sharpened? Were we to stand idly by until it was at our throats?"

Obviously we don't know how the Iraq story will turn out. But we do know that, however much the two crises resemble each other, the two American presidents resemble each other even more.