Is it 1938? That's one of the fashionable questions of the day. Especially among Jews. But not only among Jews. I posted a critical comment about a Stuart Eizenstat article in the Forward sying that it was not. But, believe me, I don't think it is 1938. Not for Jews and not for Americans either. Still, I don't understand the fixation on Hitler. Can't it be bad enough without being as bad as it was when Hitler was in power? Or, to put this another way, if you don't think it's 1938 it doesn't mean than you're apathetic or in a stupor. There was a conference at Queens College Sunday and Monday exactly on the "1938" proposition. At least two friends of mine spoke, Michael Walzer from the Institute for Advanced Study and a frequent contributor to TNR and also Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University and an, alas, less frequent contributor to TNR. Still: here and here. I had breakfast with Moshe yesterday morning, and he promised to write an article, not on this abstract query but on how the West should wage war against the terrorists and the terrorist states. He thinks that our present paradigms are all mistaken and that...well, I wait for his article. I guess you'll have to wait also. But 1938 is irrelevant. Nazi Germany was an advanced industrial power with scientific capabilities at the outer edge of the technologies of war-making. So was Imperial Japan. Our present enemies are not powerless. But they do not possess even the knowledge of how to make an airplane of any sort. Or a car. Or, for that matter, an air conditioner. They can buy all of these, of course, with their money from oil. Oil, then, is what keeps them from being thoroughly third world countries. That suggests something, doesn't it?