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The Ghost Of Neville Chamberlain

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By H.D.S. GREENWAY Boston Globe Correspondent

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 29, 2008

It was President Bush who introduced the ghost of Neville Chamberlain into the 2008 presidential election.

Addressing the Israeli parliament, Bush lashed out at those who would "negotiate with terrorists and radicals. We have heard this foolish delusion before" when Nazi tanks rolled into Poland, he said. "We have an obligation to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been discredited down through history."

Generals are often accused of fighting the last war. In this case, the president is fighting the war two wars before the last war. But the image of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich has staying power, and is used again and again to justify stands that have no relevance to World War II. And although Barack Obama was never mentioned in Bush's speech, the message was delivered.

Bush and the hard-liners around him love to say: Never talk to evil. But in fact the United States has been talking to both the Iranians and the North Koreans, even though they are in Bush's original "axis of evil."

As for the Israelis, the next thing they did after listening to Bush was sit down and talk to Syria, a junior partner in Bush's evil axis, because negotiating with Syria is very much in Israel's interest.

It was John Kennedy, in his inaugural address, who said: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." When he met Nikita Khrushchev, however, Kennedy was subjected to verbal abuse. Khrushchev then put up the Berlin wall and inserted missiles into Cuba.

The conventional wisdom is that it was because of Kennedy's apparent weakness that Khrushchev acted as he did. But Khrushchev had other reasons to do both. He needed the Berlin Wall to stop East Berlin from fleeing to the West. And the Bay of Pigs did more to influence Khrushchev's gamble in Cuba than any meeting.

Likewise, it wasn't the fact that Neville Chamberlain met Hitler that amounted to appeasement. It would have been irresponsible of him not to meet the German leader. The appeasement came when Chamberlain acceded to Hitler's demands for Czechoslovakia. As Winston Churchill said, Chamberlain had a choice between war and dishonor. He chose dishonor and got war.

These are not the post-Jimmy Carter years when the United States foreign policy needed a little more coherence and toughening up. The next president will be following on a radical and overly belligerent foreign policy that sought, and failed, to impose democracy in the heart of the Middle East with a war that has proved to be an unmitigated disaster. The task will be to rebuild America's lost legitimacy and prestige as a bulwark against extremism, not more intransigence and blind toughness.

McCain needs to distance himself from Bush in the foreign policy realm, not parrot him. Exploring Iran's legitimate fears and regional interests should be a first step, if only to separate them from Iran's illegitimate interests. After all, Winston Churchill also said: "Better jaw jaw than war war. "

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Boston Globe.

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