By someone I love to quote... Winston Churchill.. and pretty appropriate to the current news..
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."
If anyone knows anything about this subject, it was Winston Churchill... Food for thought.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Churchill also said this in the House of Commons as his eulogy to Neville Chamberlain: "Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned."
ReplyDeleteEven if the Munich Agreement was an unsuccessful gesture of appeasement, two things are still important to keep in mind: if nothing else, it bought time for Britain and its Allies to actually establish a military coalition to resist and defeat Hitler; second, there's a difference between dialogue and appeasement.
best
A.
Since radical Islamic states desire attention from the Western powers, and wish to be viewed on an equal footing, isn't reaching out for dialogue, instead of accepting a dialogue offered by the other side, just another form of appeasement?
ReplyDeleteI think that's a little chicken-and-egg. I think it would be hard to say, for example, that Iran wants attention from the United States in any real, practical way -- but it is competing for influence amongst its neighbours.
ReplyDeleteNow we might argue about whether Saudi Arabia is a 'radical' Islamic state, but the fact that the United States is willing to sign civilian nuclear energy deals (in addition to the millions of dollars in defense hardware deals) with our largest source of foreign oil is an even more insidious form of appeasement.
Dialogue is just talking (ideally with the hope that some kind of understanding might be reached) -- the right would have us believe that talking is a bad thing, or somehow weaker than just invading another country. And as we have seen, countries and radicalized terrorist groups are rarely exactly the same thing. This is simply to say that reducing the world to simple binaries of good:evil and to neat homologies of Taliban: Afghanistan, for example, is also too simplistic as a foreign policy strategy.
Don't get me wrong, a lack of foreign policy experience is what worries me about Senator Obama as a prospective president. (I wish candidates had to name their cabinets before the elections, for example.) But I'm less worried by him reaching for a telephone than the big red button.
We should have this conversation over beer.
best
A.