Obama, McCain, and Munich by Ira Chernus
Published on Saturday, May 24, 2008 by Foreign Policy In Focus
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5246
George W. Bush made headlines when he celebrated Israel’s 60th anniversary
by warning the
Knesset, Israel’s parliament, against the “false comfort of appeasement.”
The two words that
sounded most loudly were the ones that Bush did not actually say: “Obama”
and “Munich.”
The Wa****ngton Post’s Dan Balz summed up the general consensus: “More than
anything said so far
by John McCain, Bush’s comments … signaled what the principle Republican
attack line will be in
the campaign against Obama.” The White House officially denied the charge
even as it privately
confirmed the strategy. And when re****ters asked McCain to respond, he
replied “Yes, there have
been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right.”
The Obama campaign must have been delighted. The last thing McCain needs
now is to have the
least popular president in living memory become his campaign spokesman.
But the charge of
“appeaser” won’t go away. So let’s look at some facts, starting with the
other name that Bush
put front and center without actually saying it: Munich.
The Nazis Are Coming
In case anyone missed the connection, McCain made it clear when he told
re****ters that there
have been appeasers in the past “and one of them is Neville Chamberlain.”
In 1938, British Prime
Minister Chamberlain met with Hitler in Munich and agreed to let Germany
annex the Sudetenland,
the predominantly German part of Czechoslovakia, to gain what he called
“peace for our time.”
Chamberlain has been scorned ever since as the greatest of all appeasers.
Or at least that’s the
conventional wisdom.
In fact, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt heard the news of the Munich
pact, he sent
Chamberlain a telegram with just two words on it: “Good man.” Roosevelt
told his ambassador to
Italy, “I am not a bit upset over the final result.” His most trusted
foreign policy adviser,
Sumner Welles, predicted that the Munich accord might lead to a new world
order based on justice
and law. Half a year later, FDR still hoped to negotiate with Hitler by
appealing to reason:
“This situation must end in catastrophe,” the president wrote in a
personal letter to the
Fuhrer, “unless a more rational way of guiding events is found.”
The idea that Munich represented not merely a mistake but a moral
catastrophe did not emerge
until later, when it turned out the Nazis were intent on war no matter
what concessions they
received. Once he was in the war, FDR started negotiating with another
leader viewed by many
Americans as evil incarnate: Josef Stalin. FDR may have shared their view.
He justified his
alliance with Stalin as “holding hands with the devil.” But if that’s what
it took to promote
American interests, Roosevelt did not hesitate to do it.
Negotiating with the evil enemy became bipartisan policy under Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Ike’s
popularity rating soared when he met with Soviet leaders Khrushchev and
Bulganin in Geneva in
1955. That set off an almost continuous round of disarmament talks, which
continued when the
Democrat John F. Kennedy became president. Kennedy also made sure that
summitry with Soviet
leaders became a bipartisan institution. Richard Nixon won wide praise for
extending it to
China, though he was criticized from the right for edging too close to
appeasement. A few years
later, most of those same right-wingers were praising their leader, Ronald
Reagan, for his own
summitry with the Soviets.
Even During War
The bipartisan policy of negotiating with enemies has extended to active
wartime situations too.
Harry Truman negotiated endlessly with the other side during the Korean
War. His popularity sank
not because he negotiated but because the talks brought no end to the war.
In the Vietnam War
era, Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger for talks with the North
Vietnamese.
This is merely the record of public negotiations with enemies. There is
also a rich record of
secret back-channel talks. JFK defused the 1962 Cuban missile crisis not
by “standing tough” and
risking war but by secretly agreeing to take U.S. missiles out of Turkey
if the Soviets withdrew
their missiles from Cuba.
Then there’s the case of Iran. When McCain responded to Bush’s recent
inflammatory speech, he
said: “It’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when
President Reagan was
president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with
the religious
extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming
home.”
McCain is off the mark. There were behind-the-scenes negotiations leading
up to the hostages’
release at the very moment Reagan took the oath of office, and some charge
the Reagan campaign
was directing them. The new administration certainly did plenty of
negotiating with the Iranians
(with Israel in the middle), selling them missiles to raise money for
illegal sup****t of the
contras in Nicaragua.
Bush’s memory of history is obviously fuzzy, too. After breaking off the
negotiations Clinton
had begun with North Korea and making that nation a charter member of the
“axis of evil,” Bush
himself resumed talking with Pyongyang because it was obviously in the
best interests of the
United States.
At least since FDR, then, presidents have regularly negotiated with
leaders of nations they
publicly decried as evil. So there is no historical basis for the charge
that Obama is an
“appeaser,” simply because he says it makes sense to talk with the leaders
of Iran, Syria, or
other nations that are supposedly our enemy.
History of Misrepresentation
Since these facts are so well-known, the cor****ate media and everyone else
should have joined
Senator Joe Biden in treating the Bush-McCain charge of “appeaser” as
nonsense.
But the charge may well have legs because it fits a long-standing pattern.
Presidents and other
U.S. leaders who negotiated with supposed enemies have regularly (no
matter how unfairly) been
accused of appeasement. Democrats spent years fending off charges that
Roosevelt had appeased
Stalin at their Yalta summit (where Churchill did agree to give Stalin
control of much of
Eastern Europe, perhaps with FDR’s knowledge). In 1957, Eisenhower told
his national security
advisor that he was worried the Democrats would turn the tables and attack
his disarmament
negotiation plans as “our Munich.”
By then, though, the meaning of “appeasement” and “Munich” had changed.
And that change holds
the key to the im****tance of the “appeasement” charge in this year’s
election.
“Appeasement” began as an accurate charge of miscalculation. In1938, the
British wrongly thought
that a grant of the Sudetenland would stop German aggression. So the
opposite of “appeasement”
was intelligence: an accurate calculation of enemy intentions and a
well-crafted rational
pursuit of one’s own national interest.
But Eisenhower meant something quite different when he told aides: “If you
are imposing a moral
program in this world, you have to stand behind it with strength … It
would be unthinkable to be
guilty of a Munich. It is likely that you do come to a place uncomfortably
close to war, but you
cannot retreat and retreat.” Ike said he was willing to risk nuclear war
to stop the Chinese
from shelling two tiny islands in the Straits of Formosa because “should
the Reds eventually
control Formosa, that would be a real Munich,” and “there was hardly a
word which the people of
this country feared more than the term ‘Munich.’”
By the 1950s, then, “appeasement” and “Munich” meant far more than
mistaking the enemy’s
intentions. Those words now meant doing anything that might allow the
enemy to gain any
advantage, or anything that might look like advantage, anywhere in the
world. The opposite of
“appeasement” became “softness,” or the appearance of “softness.” Anything
less than an
absolutely rigid unyielding resistance to every move of the opponent, no
matter how rational or
understandable that move might be, could now be tarred with the dreaded
epithet “appeasement.”
This change in the meaning of the word flowed from a change in the concept
of the enemy. FDR and
Chamberlain saw Nazi Germany as evil because it was competing with, and
threatening to harm,
U.S. and British interests. When FDR wrote to Hitler urging “a more
rational way of guiding
events,” he said nothing about stopping persecution of Jews and others in
Germany. He demanded
only that Germany stop arming for war and start “opening up avenues of
international trade.” The
underlying picture was of nations in conflict because each was pursuing
its own self-interest,
as nations always do.
By Eisenhower’s time, the war was ideological. The fascists and communists
were rashly lumped
together as “totalitarians”: people who would settle for nothing less than
total control of the
entire world. The strong dose of realpolitik in the Soviet leaders’
foreign policy was ignored.
They were not treated as rational beings like us. The Eisenhower consensus
said that the only
way to deal with them was to keep them penned up behind a wall of
containment, a wall so highly
fortified it would be impenetrable and immutable.
New War, New Enemy
The United States’ new enemy, “the terrorists,” are cast in the same
“totalitarian” mold. Bush
made that clear when he told the Knesset that the United States and Israel
are fighting “a clash
of visions, a great ideological struggle … an ancient battle between good
and evil.” While we
“defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and
truth, on the other side
are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control.”
The fight is thus not about power and resources. It’s about fundamental
moral values. So
“appeasers” are no longer charged with a failure of clear thinking. In a
return to the thinking
of the 1950s, any hint of “softness” or wavering on the promise of
absolute resistance to evil
is treated as an out-and-out moral failure.
Even if FDR referred to Stalin (rather jokingly) as “the devil,” he
treated Stalin as a rational
leader pursuing national interests such as defeating the Nazis and
ensuring his country’s
survival.. In Bush’s rhetoric, Osama bin Laden is a much more literal
devil figure — an
irrational, inexplicable force of pure malice, doing evil for the pure
sake of doing evil,
doomed to all eternity to keep on attacking the virtuous. That bin Laden
might have rational
interests, however contrary to U.S. policy, is not considered. Bush
applies the same devilish
qualities to all leaders of nations he depicts as enemies, and sometimes
to those nations as a
whole. McCain tends to follow suit.
From that perspective it makes sense to say, as Bush did, mockingly and
sneeringly: “Some seem
to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as
if some ingenious
argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” The premise
is that diplomacy can
have no effect on an enemy driven by absolute evil. But every president
since FDR has seen
diplomacy have very real effects on the declared enemies of the United
States: the Soviet Union,
China, North Korea, and so on.
There is a theological dimension here. If the enemy is not a human being
like us but an agent of
the devil, or perhaps the devil himself, then all who fight the enemy are
by definition on the
side of God. A geopolitical contest becomes a religious war: two
implacably opposed belief
systems in conflict, with not the slightest possibility of compromise or
even mutual
understanding. The question of misunderstanding doesn’t arise.
“Appeasement” is simply a matter
of sin.
Responding to Appeasement
Obama says he’ll debate the Republicans on foreign policy any time. But
Obama’s way of talking
about negotiation with the enemy is vintage 1930s FDR. Like most
Democrats, he wants a debate
about intelligence, about who can be smarter in pursuing American
interests and making life
better for the voters. He asks voters to trust that he’s smart enough to
avoid appeasement of
the miscalculation variety.
Bush and McCain, on the other hand, speak Eisenhower’s language. They want
a debate focused not
on intelligence but on moral and spiritual fortitude. They want to frame
the issue in
theological and patriotic terms: Who can hold the line more firmly against
the implacable,
eternally aggressive force of evil in the world — and thus prove himself a
true American?
According to Matt Bai, writing in The New York Times, “McCain considers
national values, and not
strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy.” The
national values McCain
rests his campaign on are moral fortitude and spiritual strength, an
absolute refusal to
“appease” or concede even an inch to evil — the same values that McCain
says got him through his
years in a North Vietnamese prison. He offers those painful years as the
proof that he is the
true embodiment of what America stands for: not smart self-interest, but
absolutely intransigent
resistance to moral evil.
McCain and his strategists know the truth in what Harold Meyerson recently
wrote: “Should the
election turn on the question of ‘What are you going to do for America?’
rather than ‘Are you a
real American?’ Republicans are doomed.” They hope that the “appeaser”
charge will focus the
campaign debate around existential questions of American identity. McCain
is depending on
Eisenhower’s equation of “appeasement” with immorality and spiritual
weakness, identified as
un-American qualities.
If the polls can be believed, McCain’s strategy may be working. Far more
than half the public
still oppose the war and say that want to bring U.S. troops home. Those
numbers are holding
steady. But there has been a tiny change on the question, “Which candidate
do you trust most to
handle the Iraq war?”. McCain, the “as-long-as-it-takes-to-win” candidate,
was running clearly
ahead on Iraq. Now he is more-or-less tied with Obama. So there is a small
but substantial
number of voters — perhaps enough to swing the election — who agree with
Obama’s “end the war”
policy but trust McCain more to do the right thing in Iraq.
As Bai said, “McCain’s main reason for continuing on in Iraq seems to be
that we’re already
there and must not accept defeat.” He asks voters to trust that he’s
strong enough to resist the
immoral temptation of appeasement. He asks voters to make the moral and
spiritual choice rather
than the intelligent choice. We’ve been there before — in 2000 and 2004.
If the Obama campaign
is going to win, it will have to understand why the “appeasement” charge
is so effective and
craft a strategy that can deflect it.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and
author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.
Email:
chernus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Finally, the campaigns of 1793 and 1794 set Clausewitz on the path of
recognizing war as a
political phenomenon. Wars, as everyone knew, were fought for a purpose
that was political,
or at least always had political consequences. Not as readily apparent
was the implication
that followed. If war was meant to achieve a political purpose, everything
that entered into
war — social and economic preparation, strategic planning, the conduct of
operations, the
use of violence on all levels — should be determined by this purpose, or
at least accord
with it. Even though soldiers had to acquire special expertise, and
function in what in some
respects was a separate world, it would be a denial of reality to allow
them to carry on
their bloody work undisturbed until an armistice brought their political
employer back into
the equation. Just as war and its institutions reflected their social
environment, so every
aspect of fighting should be suffused by its political impulse, whether
this impulse was
intense or moderate. The appropriate relation****p between politics and war
occupied
Clausewitz throughout his life, but even his earliest manuscripts and
letters show his
awareness of their interaction.
The ease with which this link — always acknowledged in the abstract —
can be forgotten in
specific cases, and Clausewitz’s insistence that it must never be
overlooked, are
illustrated by his polite rejection toward the end of his life of a
strategic problem set by
the chief of the Prussian General Staff, in which every military detail of
the opposing
sides was spelled out, but no mention made of their political purpose. To
a friend who had
sent him the problem for comment, Clausewitz replied that it was not
possible to draft a
sensible plan of operations without indicating the political condition of
the states
involved, and their relation****p to each other: ‘War is not an independent
phenomenon, but
the continuation of politics by different means. Consequently, the main
lines of every major
strategic plan are largely political in nature, and their political
character increases the
more the plan applies to the entire campaign and to the whole state. A war
plan results
directly from the political conditions of the two warring states, as well
as from their
relations to third powers. A plan of campaign results from the war plan,
and frequently - if
there is only one theater of operations - may even be identical with it.
But the political
element even enters the separate components of a campaign; rarely will it
be without
influence on such major episodes of warfare as a battle, etc. According to
this point of
view, there can be no question of a purely military evaluation of a great
strategic issue,
nor of a purely military scheme to solve it.’
Everyman’s Library, 1993 ISBN: 0679420436 On war /by Clausewitz, Carl
von, 1780-1831.
Knopf, 1993. From the introduction by Peter Paret, Pg7
_____________________________________________________________________
The U-2 is a jet-powered reconnaissance aircraft specially designed to fly
at high altitudes
(i.e., above 70,000 ft [21 km]). It was used during the late 1950s to
overfly the Soviet
Union, China, the Middle East, and Cuba; flights over the Soviet Union,
the primary mission
for which the plane was designed, ended in 1960 when a U-2 flown by CIA
pilot Gary Powers
was shot down over the Soviet Union. This event was a major political
embarrassment for the U.S.
http://www.espionageinfo.com/Te-Uk/U-2-Spy-Plane.html
Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev's reaction to the overflights which
were discovered
just before a summit conference in Paris with President Eisenhower: "It
was as though the
Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting" .
. ."How could
they count on us to give them a helping hand if we allowed ourselves to be
spat upon without
so much as a murmur of protest?" The only solution was to demand a formal
public apology
from Eisenhower and a guarantee that no more overflights would take place
. . .
But the apology Khrushchev was looking for would not come. Despite
having trespassed
on the Soviet Union for the past four years with scores of flights by both
U-2's and heavy
bombers, the old general still could not say the words, it was just not in
him. . . A time
bomb had exploded, prematurely ending the summit conference. . .
Back in Wa****ngton, the mood was glum. The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee was
leaning toward holding a closed door investigation into the U-2 incident .
. . In public,
Eisenhower maintained a brave face. He "heartily approved" of the
congressional probe and
would 'of course fully cooperate,' he quickly told anyone who asked. But
in private he was
very troubled. For weeks he had tried to head off the investigation. His
major concern was
that his own personal involvement in the overflights would surface,
especially the May Day
disaster. Equally, he was very worried that details of the dangerous
bomber overflights
would leak out. The massed overflight may in fact, have been one of the
most dangerous
actions ever approved by a president.
pg. 51-55 ~Body of Secrets; Anatomy of the Ultra Secret National Security
Agency
James Bamford
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress of
human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of
earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing, and for the time
being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is
no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and
yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want
rain without
thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may
be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and
you have found out the
exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and
these will continue
till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of
these ideas, Negroes
will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as
they submit to those
devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men
may not get all they
pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we
ever get free from
the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.
We must do this by
labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the
lives of others."
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
Frederick Douglass, 1857
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http://www.politicsusaweb.com/
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