As a
professional historian, I normally do not place much stock in
historical analogies. They usually obscure and confuse more than
they clarify.
But in the case of the recent P5 + 1 talks in
Baghdad that will resume in Moscow later this month -- when the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, will try
again to negotiate an agreement with Iran that will prevent its
nuclear program being used to develop nuclear weapons -- an analogy
comes to mind that suggests what the results of these negotiations
are likely to be.
The analogy is with the Munich conference at
the end of September 1938, at which Nazi Germany, Italy, France, and
Great Britain forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany the so-called
Sudetenland, in the western part of the country, where some (but by
no means all) of the three million ethnic Germans living there were
demanding, in the name of self-determination, that it become part of
Germany.
Hitler favored this because it made easier the
destruction of Czechoslovakia, which in turn would facilitate the
acquisition of lebensraum (living space) in Russia for the Aryan
race. Additionally, the Czech government was required by the Munich
agreement to cede to Poland all parts of Czechoslovakia where the
population was more than 50% Polish, and to Hungary all territory
where the population was more than 50%
Magyar.
THAT THE agreement was negotiated by the four
heads of state -- Hitler, Mussolini, Edouard Daladier for France,
and Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister -- rather than
by their foreign ministers underscored its significance. Hitler had
scheduled an invasion of Czechoslovakia for October 1 - a fact known
to the British and the French -- if it did not meet the Sudeten
Germans' demand, and for that reason the Munich agreement seemed to
preclude a European war. In reality it merely postponed
it.
Conspicuously absent from the conference were
the United States, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia itself,
whose vital national interests the participants at Munich did not
consider legitimate enough for the Czechs to be present to protect.
The closest any representatives of the Czech government got to the
negotiating table was a room adjacent to it, where two lowlevel
functionaries sat in silence, forbidden to participate in the
negotiations.
For good reason Munich has become code for the
appeasement of regimes that cannot be appeased because there is no
limit to the demands they will make.
The obvious analogue of Czechoslovakia in the
P5 + 1 talks is Israel. Like Czechoslovakia in 1938, it is the only
country whose existence is deemed illegitimate by a participant in
the talks, namely Iran. The Iranian government has repeatedly, and
with increasing vehemence, threatened to annihilate Israel -- most
recently by Major General Hassan Firouzabadi in a speech in Tehran
this past Sunday. Nonetheless, Israel is not represented at the
talks; there are not even any Israelis in an adjacent room.
And like Nazi Germany in 1938, Iran will not be
deterred by any agreement it signs from its longstanding intention
of acquiring nuclear weapons for the purpose of annihilating Israel
and dominating the entire Middle East. Like Hitler, who six months
after Munich ordered German troops to occupy the rump that remained
of Czechoslovakia, the Iranians several times have agreed to limits
on their actions, for example on the percentage to which they will
enrich low-grade uranium, only to ignore these limits when it became
possible politically to do so.
By consenting to America's participation in
these talks, President Obama is acquiescing in a process that can
only jeopardize the lives of the six million Jews (and the one
million Arabs) who live in Israel. That he is doing so while
claiming "to have Israel's back" is an act of cynical calculation
worthy of the appeasers at
Munich.
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The writer is a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and the author, most recently,
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The writer is a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and the author, most recently,
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