I M P R E S S I O N S

Iraq and the Ghosts of Munich
A popular lesson is misapplied

1.28.03 |  Nothing has haunted American foreign policy more than the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving the Munich Agreement in his hand and declaring that he had brought "peace in our time." He hadn’t, of course. Adolf Hitler, only emboldened by Western Europe’s sellout of Czechoslovakia, continued his aggression, leading ultimately to World War II. The memory of this debacle has since clouded the worldview on the role of diplomacy in resolving international conflicts.

As a people, we have unmitigated contempt for anything that smacks of appeasement. The problem is that politicians and commentators so frequently misapply "the lesson of Munich" to situations where it has little or no relevance.

Case in point: Iraq. Munich analogies have been the frequent weapon of choice for neoconservatives advocating war with Iraq. Richard Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon’s defense policy board, caused something of a stir last August, for example, when he compared European appeasement of Hitler before World War II to the situation in Iraq. Writing in the Daily Telegraph (London) on the likelihood of war there, he asserted: "A pre-emptive strike against Hitler at the time of Munich would have meant an immediate war as opposed to the one that came later. Later was much worse."

Similar but more strongly worded arguments accusing those who oppose immediate war with Iraq of Munich-style-appeasement have appeared with some frequency in conservative publications such as the National Review Online, The Washington Times and TownHall.com. Neoconservative flamethrower David Horowitz recently penned a particularly caustic example under the title, "Left Scrambles to Betray America."

On their merits, such arguments are silly. True, Saddam Hussein and Hitler both make history’s A-list of brutal dictators and war criminals, but there the similarity ends.

In September 1938, when the Munich Agreement was signed, Hitler was making credible threats of an imminent attack against neighboring countries; Hussein, by contrast, hasn’t lifted a finger against another nation since being routed in the Gulf War 12 years ago. While there’s no doubt Hussein is the bad guy in this conflict, the truth is that he’s not the one who’s making the threats (other than a little posturing in response to our threats).

But the strongest evidence against the appeasement analogy is found in the terms of the Munich Agreement itself. Under those terms, the western powers turned over to Germany a portion of Czechoslovakia. They literally gave away the territory of another sovereign nation. By contrast, Iraq has been given nothing, nothing, that is, aside from crippling sanctions, stringent limitations on its sovereignty, regular bombing attacks and a humiliating series of intrusive inspections. Hitler was appeased; Hussein got clobbered. One can argue whether the steps taken have been adequate, but by no fair definition may they be described as appeasement.

The fact that accusations of appeasement have gained some small traction in the Iraq debate is an indication of just how embedded the "the ghosts of Munich" have become in our culture. There are, in fact, two such ghosts, or fallacies, that haunt us to this day: First, the overwrought idea that every affront to U.S. interests must be met with maximum military force and that any attempt to rely on diplomacy is naive. And, second, the corollary assumption that any failure by the United States to respond with force to a provocation by a foreign power will inevitably lead to bigger and bigger acts of aggression, ultimately threatening our very survival as a nation. These fallacies have found their blood brothers in administration hawks like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

But history tells a different story. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis. American pop culture has a very specific image of what took place during that confrontation 40 years ago: A handsome young president bravely stood his ground against Soviet bullying, ultimately winning the day by forcing the older and decidedly unhandsome Soviet dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, to back down. But that’s a far cry from what U.S. military leaders thought at the time.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimous in urging immediate air strikes against the new Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba, to be followed by a full-scale invasion and occupation of the island. They considered Kennedy’s plan of a naval embargo wrong-headed and grossly inadequate. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay didn’t mince his words: "This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich," he told Kennedy in October 1962.

Leading members of Congress agreed. Sen. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and Rep. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, all advocated an invasion. Many of Kennedy’s closest advisors concurred.

Thanks to the release of Soviet documents, we now have a pretty good idea what would have happened if Kennedy had followed this advice. The Soviet troops in Cuba would have fought back fiercely, possibly including the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The Soviets would almost certainly have struck back elsewhere against American interests, probably by attacking our missile emplacements in Turkey. We would have responded in kind. The most likely result would have been World War III.

The lesson would seem obvious. In protecting America’s interests in a dangerous world, being tough is important. Being smart is more important. And contrary to the assumption of the first fallacy mentioned above, war is only rarely the smart move, even in the face of substantial provocation.

That same sort of faulty logic applies to the second fallacy, the assumption that if we don’t "take out" the bad guy (in this case Hussein) at the very first sign of trouble, we inevitably will have to fight him later, after he has grown stronger. Similar thinking led America into the Vietnam War, of course, under the intellectual banner of the "domino theory."

As a child growing up in the 1960s, my political consciousness was born in the baptism of fire of the Vietnam era. Vietnam was, in fact, the subject of my very first attempt at political commentary. My fifth grade class held a debate on whether the United States should withdraw from Vietnam; I was assigned the pro-war position. My presentation was stuffed full of dire warnings of falling dominos and of the fearsome red tide. We had to stand our ground, I insisted, or be prepared to fight later in the streets of Buffalo.

I was wrong, of course. While it’s true that South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (nations of little strategic importance to the United States) eventually fell to communist forces, communism spread no further in the region. And in late December of 1978, just two and a-half-years after the official reunification of Vietnam under communist control, communist Vietnam invaded communist Cambodia. Two months later, communist Vietnam was itself invaded by communist China, resulting in a brief bloody border war. So much for monolithic communism spreading across the globe. In retrospect, it would seem that the streets of Buffalo were never in much jeopardy.

Here we are, some 30 years later, on the brink of another war. And once again, a president is asking us to take that awful step based upon little more then his personal assurance that it’s the thing to do. And why is it the thing to do? Well, actually that’s been something of a moving target, but ultimately Bush settled on weapons of mass destruction as the designated bogeyman to justify an attack: We must hit Hussein now or soon he’ll be dropping nuclear bombs on the streets of Buffalo.

But does anyone actually believe that? As many others have pointed out, Hussein is homicidal, not suicidal. He has always displayed a healthy instinct for self-preservation, as when he withheld the use of chemical and biological weapons during the Gulf War, rather than provoke an all-out U.S. attack against his regime. Attacking the United States or its troops with weapons of mass destruction anytime in the foreseeable future would likewise guarantee Hussein’s destruction, a step the CIA (before being muzzled by the Bush administration) concluded he would be unlikely to take, unless we attack him first, thereby leaving him with nothing to lose.

There is a certain black humor, I suppose, in finding out that our planned "preemptive war" is itself the thing that is most likely to bring about the very thing we are trying to preempt.

But then, the whole idea that we’re somehow smart enough to figure out today which nations will pose a dire threat to our security tomorrow (let alone years or even decades into the future) strikes me as a bit absurd. We certainly weren’t that smart back during the Reagan administration, when we sent materials suitable for use in biological weapons to our old ally, Saddam Hussein. And we weren’t that smart when, at about the same time, we provided military support to a certain Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden because he happened to be fighting our old adversary, the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan.

You remember the Soviet Union — the original "Evil Empire" (not to be confused with the Axis of Evil). It’s now long gone, of course, and Russia has become something akin to our friend. Yet, for years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of our greatest statesmen and military leaders were predicting that war between the United States and the U.S.S.R. was inevitable. From time to time, someone would go so far as to suggest preemptive war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, Sen. Russell, arguing in support of an aggressive military response, told Kennedy that war against the Soviets was coming "some day" anyway, then he added: "Will it ever be under more auspicious circumstances?"

And these are the guys who are supposed to decide when we should attack someone preemptively?

I have a different suggestion — let’s try slowing down the bravado over Iraq for a moment and seriously consider whether we really want to be the kind of country that "shoots first." Because if we do that in Iraq, we will end up killing thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people, including many innocent women and children, not because their country has harmed us, but because we’re afraid that it might harm us someday in the future.

The United States has stood for so many great things. I hate to think that we will now stand for that.