Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the speech of the hon. member for Okanagan--Shuswap. Clearly since so many other countries around the world possess or are on the road to possessing nuclear arms, chemical weapons and biological weapons, the whole premise of his argument rests upon an interpretation of the intention of Saddam Hussein.
As a former professor of history, I must say I have heard a lot of interesting analogies over the past few weeks with Hitler. It seems to me however that these analogies really do not apply at all because in the 1930s we did not stop Hitler. We had the Rhineland. We had Czechoslovakia. We also had a very different sort of personality. I would recommend to the hon. member the new biography by Ian Kershaw in two volumes which outlines in some detail exactly what we were dealing with, a very different personality, a suicidal personality, not someone who has attempted to create a legacy, a dynasty, palaces and a lifestyle which he wishes to preserve. Hitler was the very opposite.
The other lesson of the history of more recent times, and I would ask the hon. member to comment on this, is that we actually did stop Saddam Hussein during the gulf war and he stayed stopped. He did not immediately do what Hitler did, which was to bring down the entire Nazi regime at any cost. It was destruction or victory. There were no choices. He had a sufficient regard for his own skin that deterrence has worked.
We have known about Saddam Hussein since the 1970s. The Americans back in the 1980s presumably knew about the same person. What new thing has happened? What new self-destructive urge has come over this man that he wishes to take on the mightiest country in the world and give up the palaces, the mistresses and all the other things we read about?
It seems to me that the hon. member has a problem with intention here. Is this the same kind of personality that is likely to bring us all to nuclear destruction?