Sultan Knish
It was the fall of ’38 and the motion was submitted to approve “the
policy of His Majesty's Government by which war was averted in the
recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace."
The
policy being referred to was the Munich Agreement which carved up
Czechoslovakia and the war being averted was World War II which would
come shortly anyway. Of the hope that war would be averted through
appeasement, Winston Churchill said, “Britain and France had to choose
between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.”
Echoing
that old Munich motion, the pro-Iran left is calling the nuclear deal
that lets Iran keep its nukes and its targets their Geiger counters,
Obama’s “achievement”. Any Democrat who challenges it is accused of
obstructing the only foreign affairs achievement their figurehead can
claim.
“Cory Booker wants to torpedo a major Obama achievement,”
the New Republic shrieked. On MSNBC, Chris Hayes accused sixteen
Democratic senators who wanted tougher measures on Iran of seeking a war
to sabotage “Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement” out of “fear”
of the Israeli lobby.
Hayes and MSNBC were only echoing another
famous Democrat, Joseph P. Kennedy who warned of opposition to Munich
by “Jew media” making noises meant to “set a match to the fuse of the
world.”
Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary, of whom King George V
said, "No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris", warned
against those who wanted a sterner tone to bring an end to Hitler’s
program of conquest as today’s Hoares warn against those who want to
bring an end to Iran’s nuclear program.
“It would have met
certain failure if at the very time when we were attempting to mediate
and to obtain a peaceful settlement, we had accepted the advice of those
who said you must face Herr Hitler with a public ultimatum,” Hoare
warned. “I go further, and I say that if we had made an ultimatum in the
days immediately before the Nuremberg speech Europe would to-day have
been plunged into a world war.”
Today the Hoares warn that
stiffening sanctions against Iran and demanding an end to its nuclear
program will lead to war. For years, the Hoares of the Democratic Party
insisted sanctions were the only way to prevent Iran from going nuclear.
Now the Hoares say sanctions will alienate Iran and lead to war.
Obama
spokesman Jay Carney said the alternative to the nuclear deal would be
war. Those who support sanctions will "close the door on diplomacy,"
Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council,
warned, saying that the failure of the deal will force Obama to, “choose
between military options or allowing Iran’s nuclear program to
continue.”
Since the deal allows Iran’s nuclear program to
continue, it’s a buffet of three choices, all three of which lead to
conflict of some kind. The only variations are in the date and in the
capabilities of the enemy.
That was the problem with Munich.
Hitler
had already been making plans for a war with Britain and France that
would commence three or four years after finishing off Czechoslovakia.
The only thing that the Munich Agreement accomplished was to speed up
Hitler’s timetable from three years to one by letting him finish his
business with the Czechs earlier than he had planned.
“The
peoples of the British Empire were at one with those of Germany, of
France and of Italy, and their anxiety, their intense desire for peace,
pervaded the whole atmosphere of the conference,” Chamberlain said
during the House of Commons debate.
There’s “a new atmosphere”
in the Iran talks, the Council on Foreign Relations’ top Iran expert
said. The State Department called the atmosphere “constructive”. “Give
peace a chance,” Obama urged.
"When the time comes for the
verdict to be given upon the Prime Minister's conduct... none of us here
fears that verdict," Hoare concluded. History would deliver its verdict
on Chamberlain as it has on no other British prime minister in history
making his name synonymous with craven appeasement.
And then
Winston Churchill began to speak. "I will... begin by saying the most
unpopular and most unwelcome thing... we have sustained a total and
unmitigated defeat."
Lady
Astor, whose Nazi sympathies were infamous, interrupted him with a cry
of “Nonsense”. The Member for Berlin had written to Joseph P. Kennedy
that Hitler would have to do more than “give a rough time” to “the
killers of Christ” before she would launch "Armageddon to save them.”
“The wheel of history swings round,” she wrote. “Who are we to stand in the way of the future?”
Churchill,
like William F. Buckley, believed however in standing athwart the
history of totalitarians, their Reichs, their People’s Republics and
their Caliphates and yelling stop.
“£1 was demanded at the
pistol's point. When it was given, £2 were demanded at the pistol's
point,” Churchill retorted. “Finally, the dictator consented to take £1
17s. 6d. and the rest in promises of good will for the future.”
That
is the sum of all negotiations with totalitarians, whether it is with
Nazi Germany, Communist Russia or Islamist Iran. The totalitarians scale
up their demands and the peacemakers celebrate a victory for a
compromise that gives their tyrants what they want and makes war
inevitable through its appeasement.
“Iran’s leaders should
understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy
to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said in 2012.
Now there isn’t even a policy of containment.
Obama’s foreign
policy achievement consists of letting Iran do nearly everything nuclear
it wants in the hopes that it won’t go all the way. Containment has
given way to appeasement. Iran gets nine tenths of its nuclear ambitions
at gunpoint in the deal and will take the rest when it pleases at
nukepoint.
“We have been reduced in those five years from a
position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we
never cared to think about it,” Churchill said, “reduced in five years
from a position safe and unchallenged to where we stand now.” In five
years of Obama, the United States has been similarly reduced from a
power to a pawn. Its security has been stripped away and sold to win the
approval of its enemies. It is locked into the same process of offering
worthless security guarantees to its allies and then selling those
allies down the river to avoid the risk that those allies might ever
call on those guarantees and expose their worthlessness.
That
was the Chamberlain policy that Churchill was denouncing on
Czechoslovakia. That is the Obama policy with his chalkboard of
worthless red lines whose bluffing powers he is determined to protect.
"Relieved
from all anxiety in the East, and having secured resources which will
greatly diminish, if not entirely remove, the deterrent of a naval
blockade, the rulers of Nazi Germany will have a free choice open to
them in what direction they will turn their eyes," Churchill said.
Similarly
the nuclear deal cuts off most options for America and its allies and
endows Iran with a great many options. And once it does have nuclear
weapons, its options will be nearly unlimited.
Chamberlain’s rejoinder to Churchill reduced a practical problem to a philosophical one.
"It
seems to me that there are really only two possible alternatives. One
of them is to base yourself upon the view that any sort of friendly
relation, or possible relations, shall I say, with totalitarian States
are impossible, that the assurances which have been given to me
personally are worthless, that they have sinister designs and that they
are bent upon the domination of Europe and the gradual destruction of
democracies,” he said, reciting true facts about Nazi Germany with the
air of a conspiracy theory, the way that the pro-Iran left treats
statements about Iran’s murderous policies and aims.
If that grim
reality were indeed the case, Chamberlain argued, “There is no future
hope for civilisation or for any of the things that make life worth
living.”
Peace was no longer a rational program, but a
philosophical one. A world where dictators could not be successfully
appeased, where war could not be averted with negotiations, was not a
world that he wanted to live in. The appeasement of Iran and any other
enemy follows the same self-pitying logic.
Either the world is an
optimistic place where war can be averted with meetings and
negotiations or it is a doomed hopeless place in which no one would want
to live anyway.
For Churchill negotiations were a practical
policy with a practical end, but the supporters of appeasement had made
negotiations into a good thing entirely apart from any of the facts on
the ground or their outcomes. Negotiations were important because war
had to be averted, regardless of whether it could be averted, whether
the agreement was moral and whether it was worth anything.
By
making peace negotiations themselves into a moral absolute, the
practical issues could be ignored and moral atrocities such as the
dismantling of Czechoslovakia could be rationalized as being for the
greater good of peace. Any contradictory information was drowned in
enthusiasm, not for Hitler, but for peace with Hitler, which inevitably
became indistinguishable from enthusiasm for Hitler.
If peace
depended on Hitler and the entire hope of civilization rested on
Hitler’s willingness to live in peace, the Chamberlains and their Hoares
had to believe in Hitler to believe that civilization had value and
life was worth living. Their modern counterparts substitute the Supreme
Leader of Iran for the Fuehrer, or leader, of Germany, but otherwise
they make the same mistake all over again.
To
believe in world peace, they decide that they must believe in Hitler,
in Stalin, in Khamenei and all the other monsters of history. They must
believe that regimes which ceaselessly talk of war, build weapons of war
and torture and murder their own people on a whim somehow share their
hopes for peace.
“It seems to me that the strongest argument
against the inevitability of war is to be found in something that
everyone has recognized in every part of the House. That is the
universal aversion from war of the people, their hatred of the notion of
starting to kill one another again,” Chamberlain said.
But there is no such universal aversion. If there were, war would be the exception, not the rule.
To
believe in peace, Chamberlain had to lie to his conscience, to the men
surrounding him and to the entire country and the world. That much has
not changed, whether the subject is Nazi Germany or Iran.
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