But when you talk to young men and women in Berlin, so acutely sensitive to what Hitler did, they seem utterly unable to comprehend the implications of doing nothing about a man like Saddam Hussein, whose Hitler-like atrocities are documented in the mass graves of the tortured and the damned. Germans simply refuse to see the analogies to Hitler that are so obvious to everyone else, and that modern technology renders an evil tyrant with ambition and means far more dangerous than der Fuehrer ever was. Hitler never had an A-bomb.
Young men and women in their 30s and 40s, hanging out in the coffee shops and cyber cafes, don't want to think about Hitler. Going on endlessly about George Bush as the enemy of the people is much more fun. Contemporary German cultural attitudes suggest clues as to why this is.
From February to September, more than 1.2 million persons attended an exhibition of paintings and sculpture lent by New York's Museum of Modern Art, at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The renowned collection showed some of America's most famous artists along with Europeans, including contemporary Germans. Men and women camped out with sleeping bags and bottles of water to have a place in line when the doors opened each day. The buzz was electric.
German critics saw the show as reflective only of American imperialism and mammon - art that owed more to something stolen from Europe than to anything American. Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, analyzed the split between the waiting line and the critical reviews as a "a tale of two Europes" - of those who love American culture high and low and of those who resent it because it is so seductive.
There's a similar reaction to American political leadership. "It is hard enough to live with a giant that spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined and unleashes its might on places like Afghanistan and Iraq," writes Josef Joffe. "It grates even more to see the Gulliver Unbound dominate European culture from McDonald's to MoMA. The fear and loathing of America will outlive President George W. Bush."
There's a caution here for the senator and his friends, too.