PEACE IN OUR TIME :

If Churchill were alive today, he would strike at Saddam (John Keegan, 29/08/2002, Daily Telegraph)

The odour of appeasement that permeates the Western world has apparently driven President George W Bush to seek strength by studying the career of Winston Churchill.

Depressed by the warnings of his father's old friends against taking action against Iraq, he is looking for support in the life story of the supreme anti-appeaser. Churchill's refusal to be silenced by the peacemongers during Hitler's rise to power, a refusal all too painfully proved right when war came, sets an example President Bush finds reassuring.

If Churchill was right about Hitler, he seems to be asking, how can America be wrong about Saddam Hussein, a dictator who is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, a power Hitler never possessed?

The parallel is compelling, particularly to Americans, among whom Churchill, son of an American mother, continues to be venerated as perhaps he never was in his father's country.

But how right was Churchill?

It's interesting that the great military historian John Keegan, who I'd understood to be fairly skeptical about the war, should weigh in now in favor. but I wonder if he's not missing an important point here. If Churchill were alive today, he'd be in the wilderness, unwanted by an appeasement minded populace. For sixty years now Neville Chamberlain has been kicked up one side of the Atlantic and down the other by politicians, columnists, journalists, and historians who insisted that they'd have known that Hitler had to be stopped early. The underlying mesage of the scapegoating of Chamberlain has been that when the moment came again to either strike at a megalomaniacal dictator bent on murdering millions or to backdown in the face of his bellicose threats that we'd all demonstrate that we'd all learned our lesson. Bunk!
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 29, 2002 9:43 PM