From the vantage point of powerful offices near the banks of the Potomac, a faraway "local conflict" over "self-determination" was apt to seem like an abstraction. Another Hitler, in contrast, was a hefty concept, sellable in TV moments.

While the bombing continued in the early spring, so did the Milosevic-Hitler comparisons. The administration in Washington squandered no opportunity to lock onto Milosevic as the new incontrovertible enemy and pull the polemical trigger. Only a couple of months earlier, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had described Milosevic as a leader who "wants to, at some stage, re-enter the international community."

But as April 1999 began, the Associated Press noted the extreme image makeover: "Now she portrays him as 'cruel and evil,' and caring of nothing except staying in power." And now the verbal targeting was carefully personalized: "Where once she criticized 'the Serbs,' 'them,' or 'Belgrade authorities' for intransigence, she and other senior officials speak as if the whole conflict were about NATO vs. Milosevic. Vice President Al Gore called him 'one of these junior league Hitler types' even as officials have stopped just short of calling Milosevic's actions 'genocide.'"

Analysis in the mainstream U.S. press included some sober reflections. Washington Post staffer Michael Dobbs, who had recently reported from the Balkans, wrote:

"While the Milosevic-as-Hitler analogy favored by Clinton and Albright makes for good rhetoric, it makes a mockery of history. It is certainly true that Milosevic's policies (which were matched by other nationalist leaders, notably Croatia's Franjo Tudjman) helped destroy the former Yugoslavia. And it's also true that tens of thousands of people have been killed as a result of the wars unleashed by Milosevic in Croatia, Bosnia and now Kosovo. At the same time, however, any comparison between the rump, Serb-led Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany is laughable. Yugoslavia is so weak militarily and economically that it could never pose a serious threat to its neighbors except, as in the present case, as a source of refugees and political instability. There is all the difference in the world between an expansionist totalitarian power like Hitler's Germany and a bankrupt police state like Milosevic's Yugoslavia."

Yet, by the beginning of summer, the American media's thematic last word on Milosevic and the necessity of the seventy-eight-day bombing campaign was much closer to this pronouncement in a New York Daily News editorial: "With his blessing, Serb soldiers have drenched Kosovo with the blood of tens of thousands of Albanians and sent perhaps a million more fleeing in panic. Not since Hitler and Stalin has Europe witnessed such massive barbarism."

Iraq II: The Comparison Fits Like an Old Shoe

When the second Bush administration returned Saddam Hussein to the center stage of U.S. foreign policy, it was time to reprise countless stories about his evilness, while again eliding the cozy relationship that Hussein had long enjoyed with Washington. (When I accompanied former U.N. assistant secretary-general Denis Halliday to a private meeting in Baghdad with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz in late January 2003, Aziz glanced at the latest Time magazine, which Halliday had just given to him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the cover. "Rumsfeld has become quite a warmonger," Aziz said. "He did not seem so when he came and visited us in the 1980s.") The Iraqi dictator had not ordered an attack on another country since 1990, and his military capabilities had obviously diminished -- but comparing him to Hitler fit like an old shoe.

One of many politicians eager to keep putting it on was "moderate Republican" Christopher Shays, who repeatedly invoked memories of the Third Reich to justify an invasion of Iraq. Days before Congress passed the war resolution in October 2002, Shays went on MSNBC and used the Hitler analogy as part of a slick repertoire about Saddam.

"The burden of proof rests on those to prove that he hasn't continued his programs of mass destruction," Shays said. "That's where the burden of proof is. I've been in no classified briefing that said he has stopped his program. In every instance, he's moving ahead with it. And it's not one bomb. It's many. And we're talking about -- the only thing he's basically waiting for and trying to acquire is the enriched uranium or plutonium, the nuclear-grade material to make a bomb. It is about the size of a softball. You can touch it and it's not detectable. We will not allow Saddam Hussein to have nuclear weapons."

A minute later, Shays executed another smooth shuffle: "We're not talking about a criminal act that we have to prove in court. We're talking about the logic of events. Someone said to me, 'Prove that he will use his nuclear weapons.' To me, that's like saying, 'Prove Hitler's Germany was going to go into Poland.' We knew he went into Czechoslovakia. We knew he went into Austria. We knew he was building up his armament. We knew what he was about. We could never have proved he was going into Poland." An all-purpose formulation: When nothing need be proven, then no war need be justified, ahead of time or later on.

After more than two decades of representing a San Francisco area district in Congress, Tom Lantos was the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee by the time an invasion of Iraq was on the near horizon. He was not to be outdone at conflating Baathist Iraq with the Third Reich, as though Saddam's forces were somehow comparable to Germany's Wehrmacht. In early October 2002, Lantos pulled out all the stops on Capitol Hill as he proclaimed: "Had Hitler's regime been taken out in a timely fashion, the 51 million innocent people who lost their lives during the Second World War would have been able to finish their normal life cycles. Mr. Chairman, if we appease Saddam Hussein, we will stand humiliated before both humanity and history."

Although spared such humiliation, avid supporters of the Iraq invasion were soon struggling to respond to a plethora of belated revelations and difficulties with the occupation. At that point, references to Hitler and other historic mass murderers still came in very handy. After a brief stint as the head of the U.S. government's "civilian operations" in Iraq during early days of the occupation, Jay Garner was ready when challenged while appearing before a House subcommittee in Washington.

"In response to criticisms about the administration's handling of the Iraq war, Garner compared Saddam to Adolf Hitler and Cambodian leader Pol Pot," reported United Press International. "He related his own experience seeing children's bodies being pulled from the mass graves of Saddam's 'killing fields.' This sort of response has become central to the Bush administration's messages in reply to criticism following the invasion of Iraq and still unanswered questions about the state of Saddam's alleged weapons programs."