Well...as we have seen...killing high level people doesn't do a damn thing for securing Baghdad or Iraq. If we kill him, then his followers / militia are going to be a worse problem than Sunnis or Al Qaeda. I don't think killing him does a damn thing for anybody. He's not worth it. Then, some jerkoff steps up in his place anyway.
Molly Ivins: One of the most famous hypothetical questions of history is: What if someone had managed to murder Adolf Hitler early on? Suppose someone did, and then the Nazi movement had been taken over by, say, Albert Speer, who was a lot better organized than Hitler?
This is, of course, not really related to the thread by any means, but Speer was not an ideologue. He was basically a sycophant who didn’t particularly believe in the Nazi party, but was drawn to the power and reputation afforded him from pleasing Hitler. He was one of only two people at Nuremburg (along with a guy whose name escapes me [‘von somebody’ who at one point ran the Hitler Youth but had basically been demoted out of the party) to express guilt for the crimes (IMHO not out of moral misgivings, but in a craven attempt to save his neck) and once out of prison spent the last part of his life forging Hitler paintings and selling them to anybody who would believe him. I can’t possibly imagine him creating a ‘final solution’ because his personality was not particularly suited to leading anywhere. The world would have been a much better place if Hitler died and Speer replaced him, because he would not have formulated so evilly ambitious a plan as Cpl. One-Nut.
Well you know us architects like to suck up clients who give us a lot of work. Speer's an interesting character and I highly recommend his autobiography. Otto's description of him is somewhat right and he says as much that he was misguided to go along with Hitler. That also mean its very unlikely he would've become the Fuhrer in the event of Hitler's early demise. Its more likely Goehring who was a nutjob too would've taken over.
Fellas... the point is you don't bet history on the death of one person... yet we have seen this administration repeatedly make the claim that the tenor of the war will change after any number of individuals are removed from the scene. I think Molly was trying to go for what little humor she could squeeze out of the Nazis rather than write a historically accurate "what if" scenario. We don't want to crank up the flux capacitor and go messing with the timelines and if we're going to deal with the problems we face today, it would be wise to not fixate on the simplest, most gratifying solutions but rather look for answers that stand a better chance of lasting. Something this administration has repeatedly proved it does not have the ability to do.
