Saddam Hussein and Hitler

After Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in August, 1990, President Bush called Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "the new Hitler." This made for rousing speeches, but most historians said it was not accurate--that Saddam was in no way the threat to the world that Hitler had been. The Iraqi army was much smaller than the 1939 German army, for one thing, and its weapons were no match for the sophistication and power of the Allied arsenal. And, though Saddam was a terrible dictator who attacked and killed his own people, the destruction he caused was not nearly as great as that of Hitler, or of Stalin, who killed an estimated 35 million people during his rule in the Soviet Union.

There's another major difference between Saddam Hussein and Hitler. Until August, 1990, the West supported Saddam, even to the point of supplying him with weapons to help in the ten-year Iran-Iraq War (1979-1989). No one talked about Hitler or the "lessons of history" when discussing Iran and Iraq. Saddam became "the next Hitler" when the President needed to build support for the Gulf War.

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