Western leaders invoke Hitler to legitimize wars against enemies otherwise hard to justify.

Evidence

As Tariq Ali points out, “Ever since the Second World War the name of Hitler and his philosophy has been recklessly evoked to drum up support for Western wars. It is an interesting reflection on the recent history of the West that it has to reach over half a century back before it can conjure up a justifiable war and an enemy rooted in popular memory.… Saddam Hussein only became Hitler when he misread U.S. signals” (The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad, and Modernity [London: Verso, 2002], 310). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 755

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the demonization-mechanism thread running through Morey’s account of how Islamophobic fiction manufactures monstrous enemies; parallels the rhetorical construction of the terrorist other. — connects to: Nazi-era speech patterns survive Hitler’s downfall as popular communicative forms — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 993
• SHARE: Worth sending to a colleague working on war-rhetoric or political communication — the ‘Saddam only became Hitler when he misread U.S. signals’ line is a sharp compression of how casus belli is manufactured.