More Iran email
Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 11:17AM The same reader writes:
But consider the following conversations. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of England, famously chatted with Mr. Hitler at Munich and thought he was delivering 'peace in our time' to England. Unfortunately, Mr. Hitler didn't really see it that way, and the next year, marched into Poland to begin WWII. While not so famous, Mr. Roosevelt is, I think reliably, reported to have sent emissaries to Mr. Hitler, no friend of course. The point was to see if even at that late date a major war could be avoided. You also know the result, of course.
Mr. Carter, I've read, tried diligently to have conversations with the Ayatollah Khomeini after the U. S. embassy in Tehran was seized. [I've read, I don't know how reliable this is, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, current president of Iran, was one of the students involved in the embassy attack.] Anyway, the folks in the embassy were held for 444 days, being released on the day Mr. Reagan took the office of President. Bernard Lewis reports in The Crisis of Islam that the embassy folks were turned loose because Iran feared Mr. Reagan would behave like a cowboy.
Mr. Clinton worked diligently when he was President to formulate the Camp David accords between Israel and the Palestinians, represented by Mr. Arafat. Mr. Arafat was only kidding. Mr. Clinton's administration chatted extensively with North Korea, bribing Kim's reign with oil and, I seem to remember, nuclear help. North Korea is still a problem, seems to have ignored agreements -- or so I read.
Mr. Hussein's Iraq government made an agreement, under duress, to allow the United Nations to inspect his land for 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Continually, he put roadblocks in the way of the inspectors, and, finally, Mr. Bush decided that we would look for ourselves. No such weapons were found, but it is opined that the mother of all slight of hands' placed them elsewhere. Who knows?
And I don't really see strong evidence of your position that we aren't willing to talk. WSJ seems to differ with you.
Tom writes:
As soon as I hear the Chamberlain argument re: Iran, I know I'm being sold a bill of historical goods.
Think about the wisdom of selling Ahmadinejad as Hitler? Iran as Nazi Germany? The Iranian office of president as a fuhrer?
We all need to get smarter on Iran.
The rest of the historical cherry-picking comes off much like Michael Ledeen's book-hawking op-ed in the WSJ.
Yes, amazingly, Iran can be accurately portrayed as not being interested whatsoever in solving America's problems in the Middle East. Go figure! But then again, was Stalin ever interested? And yet we dealt with him. Was Mao? Did we ever get any "grand bargain" from the Sovs?
Or did we in each instance simply get what we could from these baddies when we were smart enough to see the overlapping strategic interests of the day?
But Iran doesn't want what we want in the region, we are told.
But didn't Iran want the Taliban gone? Didn't they offer to help, as Leverett reports?
Didn't Iran want Saddam gone? Ditto on various overtures across that timeline?
Is anyone stupid enough to think Shiia Iran favors Sunni-exclusive al Qaeda's vision for the future of the region?
And yet despite all these strategic overlaps, we decide to keep demonizing Iran despite their great ability to screw up our efforts in theater.
Ah, but Iran supports terrorism, we are told. The Sovs did the same on a far larger scale, but somehow we negotiated with them.
Ah, but Iran could get nukes and threaten our friends. The Sovs had plenty and threatened West Europe, but somehow we negotiated with them.
Ah, but Iran is crazy with religion and we all know now that the Sovs--heck, even Mao--were never crazy with ideology, despite all the tens of millions they killed in their various insane schemes. Looking back, the Cold War was just one giant rational exercise in great power balancing.
Christ, I miss the good old days.
No, the far more accurate historical analogy on Iran would be China 1972. Unfortunately, Cheney is no Nixon when it comes to smarts.
Also, remember this when you're being sold the 1938 Hitler-Chamberlain-appeasement model designed to reveal your essential cowardice: England appeased Hitler in the late 1930s because it was significantly weaker than Germany at that point.
That historical analogy just does not apply with Iran today, no matter who you cast as victim.
Not only is U.S. (cast as England) vastly more powerful (conventionally, strategically, and regionally) than the alleged Nazi Germany (Iran), but so is our alleged "Czechoslovakia." If the "Czechs" (Israelis) have 200 nukes this time around compared to our alleged "Hitler's" zero, then how are we or Israel somehow forced to "appease?"
If the argument is simply to get America to fight a pre-emptive war at Israel's bidding, then I fully understand the emotional targeting, but if the argument is focusing on America's strategic objectives in the region, then "Nixon goes to China" is a far more productive historical analogy, especially in terms of the moribund revolution and economy and regime fatigue over international isolation.
Americans really need to get out of the habit of seeing a "Hitler" in every rogue regime. The world is simply not that monotone. The analogy has become an intellectual straightjacket of sorts.
And that, to me, is truly ingenuous.
Reader Comments (7)
To my mind the book underlines a growing connection between the Shia and the German supremacy movements:
1) The resentment, humiliation and conspiracy flowing though the Shia community eerily echos the language used by Germans after WW1. Right down to the seeing of a world wide Jewish conspiracy.
2) Like the Shia living in Lebanon and southern Iraq, it was the Germans living outside of Germany who became the most radicalized, especially those who had fought and suffered defeat in WW1.
3) Modern Iran may technically be democratic but in name only. Like the Nazis, the mullahs are quite capabile of using fear and propoganda to keep their grip on power at the expense of the other political parties.
4) Last point, the complicated relationship between the Shia and Sunni populations echos that between the Soviet Union and Germany between WW1 and WW2. These two powers went from being arch enemies (the German right wing movement is described as having started largely as a reaction to the encroaching Bolshevik revolution.), to being partners and allies through the middle 20's to the 30's, then back to being enemies once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Again, what in the beginning united them was resentment of the western powers and the Jews. What ended up ultimately dividing them was mutual distrust and conflicting economic interests.
The Big Bang is working and we'll take opportunities as they present themselves, but I think we'll see more chances to bridge the gap with the Sunni who seem to have suddenly discovered capitalism, vs. the Shia who are growing ever more fascist.
In any case, its good to see some intelligent and balanced commentary on the web.
in the same way, you can make a good argument that Churchill had to appease Stalin relative to British national interest.
Chamberlain's betrayal of the Czechs goes a bit deeper than the ordinary perception. Since the 1920s, the Czechs had been investing most of their defense budgets into a Maginot Wall type defense along all the likely invasion routes from Germany. The idea was not to hold off the Wehrmacht foreverbut to make an invasion expensive in German lives and to delay a German invasion long enough for Britain and France to mobilize and attack Germany from the West. Chamberlain did not hand over all of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, only the parts with all the forts and pill boxes. It would be the equivalent of sinking the entire British navy.
In any event, I don't think that bombing the Iranians is the right way to deal with them just now. There was a recent article about the illegal trade of subsidized gasoline from Iran into Iraq. The Iraqi smugglers trade booze and dirty magazines for the gasoline. It seems to me that we ought to make sure that every town along the Iranian border has plenty of 5 gallon plastic gasoline cans, dirty magazines and booze. Maybe we could even produce some Farsi language publications in this genre, "Fatima likes long walks on the beach and a man who can successfully integrate with the Functioning Core. Her turn offs are jihad and caboose braking." When the Iranians get their fill of those temptations, make sure that there are lots of satelite radios and TV dishes to replace the ones that the mullahs are destroying.
All this gasoline smuggling will make gas scarcer in Iran and more available in Iraq, making the Iraqis more content and the Iranians less so. It might also cause the Iranians to crack down on the smuggling so that the only people crossing the border from Iran are Quds forces or al Sadr's forces carrying EFPs and other arms. Either result is a good thing.
Oh, as long as we're tossing Hitler comparisons on the right, think we can get rid of them on the left, too? I'm not overly fond of Bush, Cheney, et al, but comparing them to Nazis got old long ago. If they're Nazi's, where's the concentration camps (no, Guantanamo doesn't count; no gas chambers). Where's the ghettos and armbands?