By Tom Sgouros in
Rhode Island’s Future. See more at:
http://www.rifuture.org/another-munich-moment.html#sthash.i5D6k16x.dpuf
In a conference call
on Syria with House members this past Monday Secretary of State John Kerry
called this a “Munich moment.” My throat clenched up as I read yet one
more in an endless series of references to Neville Chamberlain’s ill-advised
attempt at peacemaking with Adolf Hitler in 1938.
Let’s start with a
stipulation: The use of chemical weapons is barbaric and ought not to be
tolerated. I believe this, and probably you do, too. No one is arguing about
this.
However, I don’t know
about you, but I have had it up to here with people trotting out the ghost of
Neville Chamberlain whenever there is a war to be waged. It’s offensive and
silly for two reasons.
The other reason
invoking Chamberlain’s ghost is offensive is this: Munich was in 1938. Was
Neville Chamberlain the last guy to make a foreign policy mistake? Is
Secretary Kerry telling us that no one since then has made enough of a mistake
to learn lessons from? Does he have nothing to learn from, oh, I don’t
know, Lyndon Johnson?
Johnson liked to refer
to Munich, too, and in 1965 used the comparison to say that surrender in
Vietnam would encourage the aggression of the North Vietnamese. This was
the moment that Johnson essentially Americanized the Vietnam war. With 48 years
to think about it, would Secretary Kerry agree with Johnson’s assessment now?
How about the Bush
gang who brought us war in Iraq? They were all over the Chamberlain
analogy. In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld said that looking for proof of Saddam Hussein’s
weapons programs was “appeasement” akin to Munich. With 11 years to think about
it, would Kerry agree with Rumsfeld’s assessment now?
Here’s some news:
since Chamberlain’s dumb mistake in 1938, we fought WWII, but we also fought
wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the Balkans, Somalia, Afghanistan, Grenada,
Panama, and probably others I’m forgetting. Do we have no lessons to learn from
those adventures? How about all the proxy wars we had others fight for us in
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, Laos, Afghanistan and the
rest? Is Neville Chamberlain more relevant to a decision about war today
than all of that blood and treasure spilt?
And beyond all that,
please Secretary Kerry, tell me again why I should believe the intelligence
assessment that supposedly guarantees the chemical attacks really were the work
of Assad’s army?
On whose credibility would I rely should I believe those
reports? Would those be the same agencies that told me so clearly false
things about weapons in Iraq? So far as I can tell, the evidence in Syria remains quite cloudy. For example, the relevant UN
agencies do not agree that the responsibility for the attack is clear. Claims
of certainty are little more than the usual stance of the charlatan.
President Obama went
even farther than Kerry. He said, about the use of chemical weapons: “The
moral thing to do is not to stand by and do nothing.” He later added, “I
do have to ask people if in fact you’re outraged by the slaughter of innocent
people, what are you doing about it?”
This is a legitimate
challenge, and the civilized world has struggled with it for decades. However,
the struggle is not a struggle simply to find answers to the question. We do
not lack for answers; we lack for good answers. We
have plenty of experience with answers that are ineffectual, wasteful, and
expensive. These are bad answers, and I’m tired of our
nation’s routine answer that seems mostly to consist of blowing things up,
shooting people, and getting our soldiers shot and blown up in turn.
To some, the
President’s failure to muster international support for action against Syria
means we must take up the task ourselves. To me, the failure means that the
world isn’t ready or able to enforce a ban on chemical weapons. While I agree
that this is tragic, I don’t agree that a solo strike against Syria will make
it any better.
Sanctions, boycotts,
frozen assets, arguments in the Hague — all these things are far less cathartic
than the fantasy of justice delivered on the tip of a cruise missile. But when
you consider the uncertainty of the intelligence and the muddle of the Syrian
civil war, the likelihood of such a missile even being aimed at an appropriate
target seem very small, let alone hitting it. I believe there are other
solutions to find, and that we owe it to ourselves and to the rest of the world
to seek them.
Please, for once,
let’s consider the limits of power. Is it disloyal to point out that history
teaches other lessons besides Neville Chamberlain’s? Is it unpatriotic to
care about blood and treasure? Is it treasonous to suggest that the most
powerful country on earth is not actually omnipotent?
It’s tempting to
fantasize how easy solutions would be if we could just storm in and knock some
heads. But Captain America is a comic-book figure, not a model after which to
fashion our armed forces. Here in the real world, problems are difficult to
solve because they are complicated. The easy answers are bad ones.
Unleashing
more violence on war-torn Syria is nothing more than a seemingly easy solution
that will do more harm than good. I beg our congressional delegation not to go
along with the easy march to regrettable violence. Some will moan about losing
“credibility”, but that is not the only object of value to protect. In the end,
our nation will be stronger tomorrow for restraint today.
Tom Sgouros is a freelance engineer, policy analyst, and
writer, easing back into blogging after a leave to work on a book about finance
(stay tuned!). Reach him at ripr@whatcheer.net.
