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Things Change, And We Do Not Actually Live In The Past

This, of course, is the perplexing thing about the Munich analogy. It’s made with a sort of eerie constancy, like the world is just chock-a-block with Hitlers. The salient fact about Hitler, however, and the world situation in the 1930s, is that it was unusual time and Hitler an unusual person. The suggestion that we […]

This, of course, is the perplexing thing about the Munich analogy. It’s made with a sort of eerie constancy, like the world is just chock-a-block with Hitlers. The salient fact about Hitler, however, and the world situation in the 1930s, is that it was unusual time and Hitler an unusual person. The suggestion that we should make recourse to strategies that, allegedly, would have, in retrospect, have been optimal for coping with Hitler as our regular basis for dealing with foreign leaders who don’t eagerly submit to American hegemonic aspirations is daft. ~Matt Yglesias

Yes, it is daft.  It is also the sum total of the neoconservative understanding of how to run a foreign policy.  Naturally, Yglesias is commenting on a Ledeen post.  This post tagged Hagel as the “ideal standard-bearer” of appeasers (meaning, of course, all people who oppose Ledeen’s brand of mad interventionism of the “throw a crappy country against the wall every ten years” variety).  Given Hagel’s foreign policy views and his record, that’s like saying Lieberman is the “ideal standard-bearer” of pacifists or McCain is the “ideal standard-bearer” of paleocons.  Hagel is such an “appeaser” that he voted to authorise Bush to attack Iraq; he was such an “appeaser” that he supported the bombing of Yugoslavia and he gives you no reason to think that he would not have been a supporter of the Gulf War and Panama had he been in the Senate at the time…well, you get the point.  When it came time to put up or shut up, the man has never not backed the use of force since he was elected.  This lie about Hagel is very much like the reinvention of Jack Murtha as some sort of lily-livered peacenik–it is the only thing neocons have left in their arsenal when traditionally very hawkish and internationalist figures turn against their lunatic policies.  This does not mean that I think Hagel has actually turned against the war, but that even his pointed criticism of how the war is being fought is enough to put him in the ranks of the new Chamberlains.  This is absurd on every level, as you would expect from Ledeen.  The strange thing is that this view of Hagel is widespread on the right, so it cannot be explained away as the fantasy of Ledeen alone.  Brownback is getting similar treatment because he kinda sorta opposed the holy “surge” (but refused to vote for cloture to bring an anti-“surge” resolution to the floor). 

On the constant Munich and appeasement references of the “1938ist” jingoes, I wrote this last summer along similar lines:

Indeed, these paradigms are likely to distort and confuse us more than help our analysis of the situation, not least because certain examples–particularly the 1938 one–impose a moral and emotional weight on the debate that is dangerous and irresponsible.  If you treat this as 1938 and you really think Hitler is on the rise and about to launch his war, nothing is going to deter you from taking action against him, knowing what you know about Hitler.  This makes people get very excited and muddles their thinking.  There is also the problem that Hitler is dead and we are not actually facing Hitler redivivus.  Indeed, it may be that if we act now as some believe the West should have done in 1938 we will precipitate precisely the kind of disaster that we believe we are going to prevent.  Comparisons of this kind are fun, and they give us historians work to do, but they cannot be the basis for analysing international tensions with any effectiveness.  Besides, any ten year old can come up with these comparisons after watching enough History Channel propaganda.  Historians more than anyone know that it is our attention to historical differences that can tell us the most about any given period relative to others.  

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