History Challenged Politicos Do It Again!

The Decider and Commander Guy got it wrong again in his speech to the Knesset the other day. His analogy between talking with "terrorists" and the so-called "appeasement" of Adolph Hitler by the United Kingdom and France at the Munich Conference seventy years ago was as wrong as a cat barking.

The Nice Young Man From Chicago, Senator B. H. Obama, was no less wrong in his shrill, quasi-hysterical response accusing the current administration of sins ranging from the usual "failed policies" to the ludicrous, "fear mongering." The Geek senses that what the NYMFC wanted to say was that the Commander Guy is actually a "war monger slavering after breaking things and killing people throughout the Mideast." Senator Obama's remark was another cat barking.

Other commentators in the political, journalistic and blogging worlds damned Senator McCain over an alleged "flip-flop" in that the presumptive Republican nominee allowed as how Hamas would have to be brought into negotiations a few months ago and more recently has said his administration would not "negotiate" with terrorists. "Oy veh!" thinks the Geek.

"Appeasement" is a favored pejorative in the American political lexicon. It is one of those blobs of mud that is hurled with great emotion, some effect and absolutely no knowledge. Back during the Vietnam War, LBJ as well as supporters of our armed effort in Southeast Asia used it time after time. So there is no surprise that the Commander Guy has brought the golem back out its crypt in recent years.

Time out!

Time to get a grip.

Admittedly the Munich Conference happened a long time ago. It predates both Bush and Obama. It even predates the Geek. John McCain was barely out of three cornered pants when the Munich Conference gave the word "appeasement" its connotation of cowardly betrayal on 30 September 1938.

That's a long, long time ago.

Time to go to the videotape. The conference was brought about by the German dictator Adolph Hitler's desire to engulf the most important part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudentenland. In a perfect world the existence of mutual aid agreements between the threatened state and France and indirectly with the UK would have deterred the German ambition.

But the world in 1938 was far from perfect. Neither France nor the UK had either the military ability nor the political will to use force in support of policy. The German dictatorship knew that.

(Even the Soviet Union, whose capo, Joseph Stalin, was bent out of shape over having not been invited to sit at the Munich table, lacked the ability to use military force. The purges assured that the Red Army was a headless, brainless force. The Germans knew that as well.)

The Munich Agreement was not a cowardly betrayal of the Prague government even though then and now that is the way the Czechs and Slovaks define it. Rather, it was the product of military and political exigency.

The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, whose name and signature umbrella have become an icon for snivelling sell-out and his counterpart the French Premier Daladier were not brainless. They were not bereft of backbone.

Neither did either man believe that tossing steak to a wolf would result in the wolf becoming a vegetarian.

They signed the Munich Agreement, which not only transferred the Sudentenland and its German majority population to Berlin but opened the strategic door to the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Agreement also announced that the western democracies were uninterested in what happened to the rump state--a virtual invitation to Hitler to gulp down the rest of Czechoslovakia at his pleasure.

Any number of sinister interpretations can be put on the Anglo-French action. Most have, including the favorite: both governments saw Stalin's Soviet Union as a threat far greater than Hitler's Germany and hoped to urge the Beast of Berlin to bare his fangs in an easterly direction.

At bottom there were real reasons why neither the British nor the French had any option other than the one taken.

The French people still suffered the pernicious anemia of World War I. The lives lost, ruined or blighted to say nothing of the destruction of the industrial plant of northeast France by the war had blighted French politics, French society, the French economy to an extent that war was simply not a thinkable option.

The British might have had more political will than the French, but not by much. Even if the Brits had been pawing the ground for war, there was still one small problem. The British Army would have been hard pressed to take on the Albanian Girl Scouts. The Royal Air Force might have been able to bomb Iraqi tribesmen effectively but that was all they could do with their collection of obsolescent aircraft. The Royal Navy was flatly irrelevant.

If your people don't have the will to fight on behalf of a diplomatic policy (or even in their own longer term interest) or if your country's armed forces lack the ability to fight effectively, what choices do you have when it comes to diplomatic put-up or shut-up?

That's right, bucko.

You acknowledge reality and buy time. Time during which political will might be mobilized or military competence developed.

That's exactly what Chamberlain and Daladier did at Munich. They practiced the hardest, most bitter form of realpolitick. That neither man effectively used the time purchased at the expense of the Czechs and Slovaks is another story.

The US has the military ability to confront "terrorist groups" and rogue states. It might not have sufficient troops to contemplate adventures in regime change with attendant occupations. But it has more than sufficient capacity to break things and kill people if such becomes necessary.

Anyone well oriented in time and place knows that and takes it into account.

Arguably the American public has the political will to accept the use of force in support of policy provided a rational, credible and truthful explanation as to the necessity is forthcoming from the president. States and non-State actors who wish the US ill know this and probably factor it into their plans.

This is why Bush's equation was wrong. If the US chooses to negotiate with any State or pretender to statehood it does so from an automatic position of strength. It is asymmetrical diplomacy.

The Nice Young Man From Chicago is wrong in his characterization of Bush's remarks as the mongering of either fear or war. His quick and shrill response underscores a reality that has already become apparent during the campaign: The Senator does not understand the nature and character of diplomatic conversations.

Diplomacy, no matter how private, no matter how tentative, works only when there is a goal and a process agreeable to all parties. A further precondition is that all parties must be open to compromise in the achievement of a solution to a mutually perceived problem.

Appeasement, correctly understood, is simply capitulation spelled differently. Surrender with a diplomatic cover. Absent the preconditions for effective negotiation, there are only two possible outcomes: surrender or a further hardening of positions and ramping up of warlike preparations.

Those who dump on McCain for the alleged sin of "flip-flopping" fail to differentiate between the demands of diplomacy on the one hand and the requirements for domestic political campaigning on the other. The Geek has no doubt but Senator McCain well recognises that some day the US will have to deal with Hamas and possibly some other equally unsavory gangs of thugs and assassins at the conference table.

Much as none of us may like the idea, Hamas is currently what the Israelis call a "fact on the ground." Calling it a "terrorist group" might be both correct and politically necessary in the context of a domestic campaign, but the fact will have to be dealt with realistically both at the conference table and, if necessary, over the sights of a gun.

History shows clearly that refusing to talk to states or groups because they are morally or politically distasteful is counterproductive. History shows that talking without preconditions is like masturbating with steel wool--neither productive nor pleasant.

Finally, history shows that the great type case of appeasement, the Munich Conference and Agreement, is actually a type case of the effects of political and military realities upon the capacity of governments to do the right and necessary thing.

We can only hope that We the People do not place a future American government into having no option other than that presented to Chamberlain and Daladier.