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June 8, 2010

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands

Walter Russell Mead

As the Security Council prepares to vote the next round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, I’m thinking of some old debates about how to handle difficult regimes.  The thoughts aren’t consoling; too many voices in the debate over Iran hearken back to some of the worst ideas in American and European history.

Of all the mass murderers, genocidaires and enablers of the twentieth century, one group of collaborators does not get its fair share of condemnation and moral loathing. Unfortunately Americans have never really come to terms with the terrible things they did, we have never really named and shamed them, and we have never diagnosed and exposed the bad ideas that led to some of America’s most fateful and costly blunders.  Until we do, our society is at risk of repeating these errors.

Neutrality_Act_Theodore_GeiselThe people I have in mind are the ‘goo-goo genocidaires,’ the willfully blind reformers, civil society activists, clergy, students and others whose foolishness and ignorance was a necessary condition for tens of millions of deaths in the last hundred years.  Unreflective, self-righteous ‘activists’ thought that to espouse peace was the same thing as to create or safeguard it.  As a result, tens of millions died.  Unless this kind of thinking is exposed and repudiated, it is likely to lead to as many or more deaths in the 21st.

We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this turns out to be particularly true when it comes to the road to foreign policy hell.  Over the years good people or at least people who wanted to be good or thought they were, motivated by what seemed to them to be the highest of motives, have taken political stands and made policy proposals that helped mass murderers gain power in their own countries and launch themselves on international careers of conquest and mayhem.  At other times, fortunately, they’ve failed to change policy; still, they wasted a lot of people’s time and made life significantly more difficult for those whose plans to help the world ultimately worked.

Paving the Road To Hell

The most notorious example is the peace movement of the 1920s and 1930s.  This movement enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of college professors, idealistic students, respected journalists, the union movement, and the mainline clergy.  If you didn’t join in, you were criticized as a warmonger, a throwback, someone lacking the broad social vision and high sense of ideals that modern times required.

It was an understandable error.  A mass civil society movement of earnest reformers, veterans scarred by their experiences in the trench warfare of World War One and determined that their sons should be spared this experience, students wanting a to build a better world, and intellectuals convinced that there had to be a better way did everything in their power to keep the United States and the western democracies out of war.  They failed;  instead they disarmed the West, left China defenseless against Japan, and prepared the way both for Hitler’s domination of Europe and Stalin’s imposition of the Iron Curtain.

The American peace and disarmament movement almost destroyed human freedom.  The peace movement gave intellectual and moral respectability to the cause of isolationism: the belief that the United States could safely ignore the unraveling of the world’s fragile economic and political order as British power waned after World War I.  But these idealistic professors, students, preachers and general all-around-good-guys were  naive, self-righteous, and smugly sure that arms cause war.

Armed with a set of wrong headed prejudices (they called them ‘convictions’ and ‘ideals) that made it impossible for them to recognize deadly dangers staring them right in the face, they minimized the difference between imperfect friends (like then-imperialist Britain and France) and flamingly wicked mass murdering thugs (like Stalin, Hitler and the militaristic governments of Japan).  Worse, they used all their considerable intelligence, power and media access to prevent Franklin Roosevelt from taking effective action to support the western democracies and China until it was far too late to prevent World War Two, and almost too late to win it.  Even then, because the pathetically and self-righteously foolish and irresponsible ‘peace activists’ of the 1930s let the Axis get so far, we could only beat Hitler with Stalin’s help; the oppression of central Europe and the Cold War were the fault of the clergy, professors and civil society activists of the 1930s as well.

hitlerjoseph_stalin

When ‘Understanding’ Becomes Collaboration

Worse, some of the ‘good guys’ sympathized with and made excuses for the bad.  Germany was resentful and bitter, they said, because the Treaty of Versailles was unfair.  Let Adolf Hitler have his ‘reasonable’ goals of reuniting ethnic Germans under one roof, and Germany would become a peaceful and satisfied country, a bulwark of European order.  This sounds crazy now, but it was the conventional wisdom among the intelligentsia and literati (except for the Communists and their closest sympathizers) during the 1930s; this is why voices warning of war like Churchill were so isolated.  War was so destructive, argued the false prophets of fake enlightenment, that only a madman would start one.  And while Hitler was alarming, the apparatus of the German state was sane.  There were moderate Nazis, with limited goals; given western forbearance, wise concessions and enough time, the moderates would edge the Nazi radicals out of power.

That was the standard refrain about Germany from 1933 through 1939 and at every crisis or turning point academics and journalists stepped forward to plead for patience and to predict an imminent triumph of the ‘moderate’ Nazis over the ‘radicals’.  In the meantime, anti-Nazi rhetoric and boycotts in the West only empowered Hitler and united German opinion behind him. Give him the Saar, Austria, yes and the Sudetenland: sooner or later he would calm down and the world would be at peace.  When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming that simply by giving Hitler the Sudentenland (the then-German speaking part of Czechoslovakia that happened to include the country’s mountainous border areas and natural defenses) he had won “peace in our time”, nobody was happier than the fatheaded peace clergy — unless it was the enlightened class of journalists and professors who set the tone for upper middle class enlightenment at the time.

It was the same thing with Stalin.  Half of the peace movement was in love with Communism; the other half thought that poor Stalin had no choice but to be brutal and tough because he was surrounded by hostile states.  Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names.  Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best. There had been plenty of sympathy for Stalin in the West during the thirties — even as he was carrying out mass murder on a scale that poor Pol Pot could only envy, Stalin never lacked for apologists and defenders among the chattering classes in those countries where they were still permitted to chat.

Understand and sympathize with their legitimate aspirations: that, the professors and preachers constantly told everyone else, was the sophisticated, modern and enlightened way to deal with these problems.  Before the war it was the poor Germans, so shabbily treated by the Treaty of Versailles that Hitler represented a necessary phase of Germany’s search for self-respect.  Before and after World War Two they said it about Stalin:  communism was simply payback for the excesses and crimes of capitalist greed.  Yes, they sometimes went too far: but surely that was ‘our’ fault for having permitted these terrible conditions to occur in the first place.

They weren’t completely wrong.  The social upheavals and injustice of early industrialization did create sympathy for communism and popular anger; German suffering after World War One was a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for the rise of Hitler.  But what the earnestly intellectual and empathetic goo-goo genocidaires missed was the character of the political movements that had come to power on the basis of these feelings.  Hitler and Stalin weren’t interested in justice; the parties they led were more like barbarian hordes organized for plunder than like groups of good folks who, once their legitimate grievances were addressed, would peaceably disassemble and go home. Addressing German grievances and working class poverty would have been very wise steps before Hitler and Stalin seized power; once they got in, the situation changed.

Fortunately the destructive doves weren’t able to fool FDR about the Nazis.  “You can’t turn a tiger into a kitten by stroking it,” he once said — but the pious nincompoops and delusional intellectuals were persuasive enough here and abroad so that France, Britain and the United States were unable to step while Hitler was still weak and prevent World War Two by enforcing the peace.  After the war, the chorus of goo-goo appeasers switched focus to trying to stop Truman and the West from opposing the spread of Stalin-dominated Communism in a war-devastated Europe.  Poor, timid Stalin, said liberal Christian writers in magazines like Christian Century and their political leaders like Henry Wallace, has been so intimidated by American aggressiveness that he had no choice but to clamp down in Eastern Europe.  The Marshall Plan wasn’t just attacked by isolationist nutballs on the right; it was attacked viciously and venomously by the so-called ‘peace’ movement and the Progressive Party.

If the Nazis and the Communists between them didn’t overrun the whole world in the terrible 1940s, it was not because the international peace movement didn’t do everything in its power to leave the democracies trembling and helpless before the totalitarian threat.  Had these people wised up and supported moderate programs of rearmament in the early 1930s and insisted that the western democracies take a stand against Hitler early on, there would have been no Nuremberg Laws, no Holocaust, no mass terror bombings of European cities, no Stalinist occupation of central Europe — and no Cold War.

Morally of course this was nowhere near as bad as what the Nazis and Communists did.  The peaceniks didn’t will the slaughter of millions of innocent people: out of ignorance and conceit they merely created the conditions which let it happen.  But while the peace movement wasn’t as evil as the dictators, the dictators could never have achieved their goals without their sanctimonious and timorous enablers in the western world.

Name and Shame

These days we are pretty good at pillorying the bad guys in America’s history: Tories, slave owners, segregationists, opponents of womens’ right to vote all get nailed in our textbooks.  But somehow the creeps and frauds of the peace movement get a free pass.  “We are the folk song army,” the satirist Tom Lehrer once wrote, mocking the moral pretensions of ‘peace activists’; “Every one of us cares.  We’re all against poverty, war and injustice — unlike the rest of you squares.”

It is just not true, historically speaking, that ‘peace movements’ lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.  We can be very grateful that Ronald Reagan and the NATO leadership turned a deaf ear to the nuclear freeze movement; had those besotted idealists had their way the Soviet Union and the Cold War might be still with us today — along with nuclear arsenals much larger and much more dangerous than anything the US and Russia now have.

Not so long ago we had a word in our society for tiger-strokers: people who thought that if you soothed the savage passions of irrational dictators by treating them with respect and giving them treats then the dictators would become less dangerous.

We called them ‘appeasers’.

It’s a good word, and we could use it today.

I don’t say that reaching out to our enemies is always wrong.  There are times when making a good deal with bad guys is the best you can do.  Nixon’s opening to China came when that country was still in the throes of the violent and lawless Cultural Revolution.  Opening the hot line to the Soviet Union so that the US president and the Soviet premier had a better chance of stopping an accidental nuclear war was also a good idea.

I think it was a good move on President Obama’s part to see if something couldn’t be done to improve relations with Russia — and with Iran.  Now, after almost a year and a half, it’s become clear that Russia has responded, a little, while Iran has responded with new threats, new lies, and new shipments of weapons throughout the Middle East.

Iran_Ahmadinejad_United_NationsMahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the United Nations.

Broadly speaking, those who want to play “Let’s Make A Deal” with nasty foreign dictators aren’t always wrong.  Some dictators like Franco just want to be left alone; others have a need to keep pushing.  It’s a legitimate argument and subject for discussion about whether the Iranians are jerks like Franco who will settle down to peacefully hang homosexuals and torture dissidents at home if left to themselves  or whether they are megalomaniacal nutcases who will interpret our forbearance as weakness — if we let them have Czechoslovakia they will start reaching for Poland.

Will Power Make Them Nice?

Maybe this is a sign of my entire unfitness to write about foreign policy, but it’s not easy for me to see why a nuclear Iran would be less pushy and demanding than what we have now.  If the mullocracy is arming terrorists, interfering with neighbors, inflaming the Middle East and making intercontinental nuclear deals with the bad guys when Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, what makes us think that becoming less vulnerable to American countermeasures would make the Iranians settle down into responsible world citizens?  If they blow off our threats and respond with contempt to our overtures when they are weak, why would they treat us with more respect as a nuclear power? Won’t getting nuclear weapons over our objections prove internally that the radicals were right while the moderates were vacillating, cowardly and wrong?  And if we are unwilling to stand up to them effectively when they don’t have nuclear weapons, who on Planet Earth will think we will rediscover our backbones when they do?

Those who think we can reach a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran that would either stop the nuclear program or enable us to coexist peacefully with a nuclear Iran are, I fear, making the same failure that the 1930s and 1940s peace campaigners made about the Nazi and Soviet regimes.  They are confusing the legitimacy of the grievances that helped the Iranian regime seize power with the aims of the regime once in place.  This regime is, I fear, a tiger not a kitten.  Concessions and consideration don’t make it more moderate; they tell it that you fear it, tell it that its tactics of pressure and threats work, and encourage it to raise its demands.

Now fortunately the Iranian regime doesn’t command a great power the way the Nazis had Germany and Stalin had the Soviet Union.  But Iran’s strategic location gives it a power to harm US interests and the international system far in excess of its power potential by more conventional measurements.  (If Iran somehow switched places with Australia, we could and would pay a lot less attention to its goals; location, not intrinsic power, is what makes Iran a big deal.) I don’t think we can ignore this regime and unless it substantially scales back its ambitions I don’t see how we can coexist with it peacefully much longer.

Obama_Confers_About_IranObama confers about Iran with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy (White House)

President Obama is going to have a tough time with this one.  His current policy of seeking sanctions while gathering international support is less a policy than a way of marking time.  There is no clear and obvious way forward, and Iran is doing everything it can (with Hamas, with Turkish and Brazilian diplomacy, with anything else it can gin up) to muddy the waters and throw the US off-track.  As President Obama and Secretary Clinton try to make the agonizing decisions that almost inevitably lie ahead, I’m afraid the appeasers will be back.  We can neither threaten Iran now nor seek regime change, they will say.  It’s all our fault anyway because we outraged Iranian nationalism by our thoughtless acts in the past.  If we can simply understand Iran’s legitimate concerns and give it what it rightfully wants then it will calm down.  After all, it is only aggressive and hostile because the poor dears feel so threatened.

These arguments have led to millions of deaths and launched world wars in the past.  Neither President Obama nor anybody else should listen to them this time unless those who make them show that they are aware of the disastrous results of this counsel in the former times and have prepared detailed and convincing arguments about why this time is different — and why this particular tiger is really a kitten who just needs to be loved.

Posted in Essays, History, Islam, Middle East, U.S. Foreign Policy
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  • http://theboulevardgirl.blogspot.com RC

    Thank you, Mr. Mead, for helping to reassure me that there are at least a few _actual liberals_ on the left.

    Keep up the good work in exposing the totalitarian enablers of the illiberal left

  • jbay

    “…and insisted that the western democracies take a stand against Hitler early on, there would have been no Nuremberg Laws, no Holocaust, no mass terror bombings of European cities, no Stalinist occupation of central Europe — and no Cold War.”

    I disagree w. your premise that the end result wouldn’t have occurred, “ie WW2″. Had we taken a stand it is also possible that Hitlers military campaign would have been pushed out but that also means that by the time the cries of war had been reached he probably would have been the one to develop the nuclear bomb along with the rocketry to deliver it.

    Remember that Germany led the world in both Rocketry and Nuclear studies, not America, before the war. What would have been the net result? Nuclear Holocaust? That’s what we got anyway isn’t it.

    As to the premise that somehow peace nicks are responsible for the atrocities that occurred. Well I would say we are all responsible regardless of our stance for the monsters in the world. It is completely speculative to say that war would not have occurred had we intervened and while I agree that pacifist are often naive but I must equally retort that the hawks tend to overestimate just how large an impact they can have. Thus doves are naive and hawks are delusional.

    The truth is that when dealing with human beings there is no end all be all method. Had we attacked Hitler before the Holocaust or invasions we would have been made to look like war mongers. Something has to be said of having the moral high ground. Without which you are lowered to your enemies level and justify his actions.

    I am by no measure a pacifist but equally I am not a war monger. I am a centrist that values reason and truth above all things. The truth is that we cannot win the current wars we are fighting because we are not able to bring ourselves to do the things necessary to win. Until that fundamental fact changes we cannot be successful in war and thus should not entertain the thought in our minds. This fact is well known by our enemies.

    Harry Truman did what was necessary to end the war. Had there been an alternative that would have spared a single life I’m confident it would have been taken. Collin Powell played that role in this generation and unfortunately we have not listened.

  • Matt T.

    Wow–what a wonderful, clear essay. Someone needs to nail this to the door of the State Department, pronto.

  • jbay

    Question???

    When will we stop acting like timid sheep afraid of our own shadow? I’m tired of being emasculated by the PC garbage tossed upon the rocks by the sea of fools. I’m tired of being told that neglecting to tell the truth is not a lie. I’m tired of being told I need to ask how you’re: “feeling today”, before I do my job which is solving your problems. Stop pussy footing around and be blunt and honest with them.

    Go to Iran and their leaders and explain to them, confidentially, the different ways that we, in our feeble American minds, brimming with Universities and research institutes, can contrive the situation playing itself out. But first make a list of all the possible ways that this can play itself out and then memorize it.

    For starters we have to stop treating the world like a zero sum game where for us to win they have to lose. A stronger middle east is a good thing if it includes being peaceful to its neighbors. We have to stop acting like our interest is the only one that matters.

    By furthering the interests of others you promote yourself. By empowering the Middle East we create a threat, that’s true, but we also create a valuable ally full of math geniuses who share our faith in the God of Abraham. As their power grows they will consume more oil, this is true, but we’re running out as it is. What we have we’re busily pumping into the ocean anyway to kill all those pesky birds and fish. Islam is not a religion of fanatics anymore than Christianity is of skin heads. That a small group perverts Islam’s ideals does not reflect ill upon Islam or God but upon our own inequity.

    There was a time when the Muslim world shared with a very primitive western world knowledge we had once lost. Maybe it’s time we return the favor.

  • fw

    Code Pink, who would be comical if they weren’t so offensive, are the ne plus ultra of the placaters, their very essence. On this part of their webpage, they are urging a hasty exit from Afghanistan. There may be very good reasons for leaving Afghanistan, but advancing the cause of women’s rights is not one of them. Once we depart, I can’t imagine it will be very long before girls and women there slip back into a state of bondage, on pain of murder or torture.

    http://www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?list=type&type=400

  • DensityDuck

    It was actually thus even before the 1920s; Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on staying out of World War I was what gave the Kaiser and his advisors the confidence that Germany could win it. They knew damn well that they couldn’t fight America; but as long as America kept saying “we won’t fight”, they were willing to keep going.

  • MDC

    Superb piece. Thank you for articulating a concept that has bothered me for years.

  • Buck O’Fama

    Good grief, you’d think the 20th century never happened with the way Obama and his useful idiot friends are handling things. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is not only a definition of insanity, but also liberalism. Coincidence? I think not.

  • BK

    I agree with all of this, and I will add that it is easy to tell the tigers from the kittens. Ask them! The truly dangerous regimes don’t hide their intent; indeed, they trumpet it. All one has to do is listen. The do-gooders always insist that they don’t mean what they say, but the evil regimes always do mean it. Take them at their word, and respond accordingly.

  • colin

    The above article is Total nonsense.

    The writer is [engaging in a pointless amusement -- ed] with words.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvg7lRsCVJ8 California Dream’n

    This video is a great compliment to your article:
    Reagan – A Time For Choosing
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvg7lRsCVJ8

  • Greg Yeakley

    I have been trying to explain to people for years something I call the ‘sin of unintended consequences,’ the damage caused by exactly the sort of well-meaning types described here. They invariably 1) fail to see the damage they cause while 2) blaming said damage on others more willing to make the hard choices they so carefully avoid. Thanks for explaining it so much better than I ever could.

  • river c

    Wait, Right wingers like Charles Lindberg supported the Nazi’s in the 30′s. Few on the right was calling for action against Germany. There was a global depression, capitalism was failing to FEED people. Your whitewashed argument fails to show how many people -across the political spectrum- initially supported Hitler and his ilk.

    And sorry, voicing an opinion against war is not the same as arming a warrior, something GE and Ford’s munitions factories did do in Nazi Germany. Strangely, Henry Ford hated war himself. It is a lot more complicated than your Liberal fascism argument. Seems you want bash the entire wide range of liberalism from a 75 years ago, using a few examples of persons who could no longer be considered liberal if they we’re making those arguments. Keep it up, we have a lot of problems NOW, but essays like this serves no purpose but keeping you employed by people who like to hear this crap.

  • Michael McCanles

    This sort of essay should be published throughout the web, and letter writers should pummel the MSM with letters carrying this message daily.

    One thing missed here, perhaps, though strongly hinted at: the need of liberals to feel morally superior. This is a neurotic state and reflects a sense of moral inferiority that can only be assuaged by way of scapegoating: literally, the transference on one’s guilt to others and then stoning them.

    Nietzsche finally cured me of “morality,” though I was on that road before I read him. But until the self-serving neuroses of the left are unmasked for what they are, namely exhibitionist grandstanding poseurs with little if any concern about all the “betterment of mankind,” we will continue to suffer their noxious noise.

  • HC

    Impressive. It’s too rare to see this sort of clear thinking on foreign policy issues, or the actual history of the 20th century, outside ‘conservative’ sources. There was one a rational, sane liberal trend in American politics, these days tiny sparks are all that is left.

  • http://www.cybercossack.com blackminorcapullets

    This article is a bit late for April Fool’s Day, isnt it?

    “Had these people wised up and supported moderate programs of rearmament in the early 1930s and insisted that the western democracies take a stand against Hitler early on, there would have been no Nuremberg Laws, no Holocaust, no mass terror bombings of European cities, no Stalinist occupation of central Europe — and no Cold War.”

    Well, yes but there still would have been Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Kagonovich and Yagoda who managed to kill 20 million before Russia and Germany invaded Poland to start WWII.

    Pleeeease stop with the Durantyesque obfuscation of the Ukrainian Holodomor.

    BTW, this genocide of 10 million included a million Amish, Mennonites, etc who made the mistake of settling in Ukraine generations prior. Their letters home decrying the genocide by starvation gave rise to Hitler in the winter/spring of 1933 – just as the Holodomor raged to its maximum peak.

    http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/nd_sd/vossler2.html

    Remember that Hitler rose primarily as an anti communist party.

  • tom swift

    All true enough, though even more so. FDR realized what he was dealing with when it came to Hitler, though he suffered from the the extraordinary fantasy that he could “handle” Stalin, in the same way that Chamberlain thought that he could “deal” with Hitler. Fortunately for the West, Truman had a more realistic understanding of Uncle Joe.

  • http://paterzplace.blogspot.com Don M

    FDR was one of the Goo-Goos. He tried to take credit for the Munich agreement, but that didn’t work.

  • M. Report

    I did not know that Dr. Seuss was an
    early political cartoonist. :)

    The parallel between the US now and the UK
    before WWII is striking; Sure hope we can
    do as well as they did.

  • Earl of Sandwich

    Would you count the Iraq War protesters as Goo-Goo Genocidaires? Sometimes peacenics are right, sometimes they are wrong.

  • http://norwegianshooter.blogspot.com Norwegian Shooter

    “The American peace and disarmament movement almost destroyed human freedom.”

    I almost threw up – my hands – when I read this. But I managed to skim the rest for capitalized words of the naming and shaming part. Here’s what I found:

    Neville Chamberlain and Munich. Congratulations for beating this dead horse one more time. That’s it for naming the pre-war portion of destroying human freedom.

    “After the war, the chorus of goo-goo appeasers switched focus to trying to stop Truman and the West from opposing the spread of Stalin-dominated Communism in a war-devastated Europe. Poor, timid Stalin, said liberal Christian writers in magazines like Christian Century and their political leaders like Henry Wallace, has been so intimidated by American aggressiveness that he had no choice but to clamp down in Eastern Europe. The Marshall Plan wasn’t just attacked by isolationist nutballs on the right; it was attacked viciously and venomously by the so-called ‘peace’ movement and the Progressive Party.”

    You name one marginal magazine, but don’t provide any quotes, articles or citations. And one candidate of one trivial party which was only active in 1948.

    “Running as peace candidates in the nascent Cold War era, the [1948 Progressive Party's] Wallace-Taylor ticket garnered no electoral votes and only 2.4 percent of the popular vote. Nearly half of these votes were obtained in New York state, where Wallace ran on the American Labor Party ballot line.”

    “In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Wallace broke with the Progressives and backed the U.S.-led war effort in the Korean War.[2] In 1952, Wallace published Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin’s excesses and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist.”

    The bigger they are, eh, WRM? Who are you going to take on next, Albanians?

  • phil g

    The big difference between the US now and the UK before WWII is that there is no equivalent to the US to come to our aid as the US did for UK. We are the last great hope.

  • Barry Meislin

    Moreover, Iran, by focusing relentlessly on the purported sheer evil of the “Zionist Entity” (taking a page from the playbook of one of the greatest—and most revered, at least in certain places—political strategists of all time), has ensured, by this master deception, which is repeatedly broadcast (and by whom?) and echoes around the world with greater and greater volume, that the world will remain off-balance and uncertain of the morality of depriving Iran of the means to coerce, intimidate, blackmail, extort, attack and utterly destroy.

  • RT

    ” Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names. Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best.”

    And the same is being said of china today.

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  • http://www.chicagoboyz.net Lexington Green

    What is the solution? Do you really think the United States can go to war with Iran at this point? We have two wars going on and potential third one in Korea. Not one foreign country, other than Israel would support us if we attacked Iran. The Russians, Turks, Indians and Chinese would all oppose it; the French, British and Germans would oppose it. The world economy is in a precarious state and a war in the Persian Gulf would lead to a spike in oil prices that would be potentially devastating.

    I see zero prospect that any American administration, far more this one, would attack Iran under these circumstances.

    Also, is it really true that the goo-goos are responsible for the USA delaying its entry into World War II? Is this consistent with the canonical WRM analysis? Is it not the case that Jacksonian America is pretty much an isolationist group, and that the smartypantses in the foreign policy elite are always writing checks that the Jacksonians don’t want to pay with the blood of their sons? Is this situation any different? And didn’t WRM teach us that the American people, through various meandering means usually arrive at a good policy outcome by a balanced approach from the various forces that are in creative tension in our country? And if so, why does the WRM of 2010 not think that the WRM who wrote Special Providence is still right, at least as to Iran?

    James Burnham said if there are no options there is no problem. Attacking Iran is not an option. So the there is no problem. Containment worked against the USSR and it will have to be employed against Iran because there is no other option. The Brezhnevite senility of the Soviet leadership gave way to Gorbachev. The Iranian mullahs may yet fall away in similar fashion. We should find a way to push them — but I think it unlikely we will attack them. And I think it unlikely the issue will resolve happily if we do.

    And I am no goo goo.

  • Ken Smith

    One of President Obama’s first acts was to remove Churchill’s bust from the White House. This essay makes that action appear chilling, indeed.

  • Walter Russell Mead

    If you read the post carefully, I think you’ll find the analysis hedged and consistent with SP. The goo-goos lent respectability to the isolationists and thereby added to their strength. At a time when the intelligentsia should have been helping educate the American public (including Jacksonians) about the need for pro-active international policy as Britain’s ability to maintain the world system declined, too many of them were coming up with high minded arguments that buttressed the isolationist case. One possible point of confusion: goo-goos are not an SP category; Hamiltonians, Wilsonians and Jeffersonians have all been attracted at various times and in various ways to the upper middle class reform project in its various manifestations through the centuries. I’m tempted to write a book on the role of the goo-goos in American history; it’s at least worth a blog post, so look for more comments in this space.

    As for Iran, you are correct to note that the post does not say what we should do. In past posts I’ve written that it may be harder to avoid war with Iran than many think; the Iranian government has so much contempt for us and so much hatred for our regional allies (Arab as well as Jewish) that fatal miscalculations are possible. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and Tojo all underestimated America’s will to fight; they misunderstood the way Jacksonian rage can transform the American scene in response to certain types of provocation.

    There’s no neat or clean answer to a problem like this one, but a firm approach that could rebuild Iranian respect for our will and our power might be the best way to ensure that they don’t cross a line and trigger responses they didn’t expect.

  • Barry Meislin

    Fascinating.

    How are Lexington Green’s arguments, in essence, any different from the arguments against confrontation proferred in the 30s?

    Similarly, why should the consequences of such arguments be any different?

    The “problem” this time around is that there exists a precedent for hoping the problem will just go away….

  • Cromwell

    “If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly” – Ronald Reagan, Evil Empire Speech

    /thread

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  • Steve

    As blind as the “goo-goos” may have been, I don’t really see how their presence or absence in the debate would have changed the decisions of the US in the 1930′s. Hitler’s crimes to date by 1937 were bullying his neighbors, pogroms, repression of dissidents, and a domestic “euthenasia” program. I doubt anyone could have convinced the American people to have gone to war over that, even without the excuse-making you describe. Ignoring Stalin’s crimes had even less impact – the whole Western intervention fiasco of 1919 demonstrated that the deomcratic world had little power to influence a weak Soviet state, let alone the well consildated and autarchic one of the 1930′s.

    A stronger case can be made about the post-war period, but then the decisive factor in the enslavement of Eastern Europe was the presence of millions of Red Army troops, not whether or not American intellectuals recognized the repressive nature of the Soviet Union.

  • Walter Russell Mead

    It’s true that the only possible excuse for the goo-goos would be irrelevance: that their wickedly careless interventions had no concrete results. That would make them less guilty but more contemptible. However, while we can never know how American (and French and perhaps most importantly British) opinion would have moved had more intellectual and political leaders taken a forthright position on the grave security threats, any spine-stiffening would have helped — for example, to promote an earlier rearmament or to weaken support for the misguided Neutrality Laws enough to block them or to have allowed FDR to veto them.

  • http://n.a. Adam Garfinkle

    Amen, to the nines, Walter!! One of your best ever. You neglected only to name and shame back to the 1920s and 1930s two famous men who were gung-ho to fight WWI, and who by so doing, and by their irresponsible pacifism after it all went sour, aided and abetted the monsters that caused WWII and the Holocaust: John Dewey and Charles Beard.

    And I would only add one of my favorite Orwell quotes: “Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent.”

  • willis

    I wonder why the author of this article failed to mention that President John F.Kennedy’s attempt to appease the Soviets very nearly got the entire world blown up in a full-scale nuclear showdown with the Soviets.

  • http://www.chicagoboyz.net Lexington Green

    Well, if we are not willing to go to war with them to prevent it, we can count on them getting nuclear weapons. I see no other analysis that adds up. So, we have to think about what the world will look like after that happens.

    Agreed that the goo-goo approach arises from the various WRM-described groups, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jeffersonian, with different nuances in each case.

    Agreed also that the Iranians present a nasty problem.

    Agreed also that Iran is not a threat on the scale of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union.

    But, is it really the case that we are in an analogous situation to the 1930s? We have a huge military, deployed all over the world. We have overwhelming nuclear superiority, if the Iranians should ever be insane enough to cross that threshhold and detonate a nuke, we could use air and naval power to devastate Iran, even using only conventional arms.

    This is nothing like the situation in 1938, when our army was no bigger than Portugal’s and was half a world away from Europe. Even so, we lack the means to conquer and occupy Iran. Continental landpower requires continental-scale armies, which require in turn a military draft, and we simply will not do that.

    So, we are almost in the reverse position of the one we were in at the time of the Long Telegram and NSC-68. Then, we had to figure out that the USSR was hostile and expansionist, then acquire the military means to contain and if necessary defeat or destroy them. Now, we already know that Iran is hostile, and we already have pretty much all the military means we are likely to need to realistically take them on. What is lacking is Kennanesque analysis of how to use political means, coupled with containment and deterrence, to destroy the mullah regime.

    I suggest that our most important ally is the Iranian people, who hate the mullahs more than we would ever dream of.

    So, the relevant question is, how do we emulate, not FDR or Truman, but Nixon and Reagan, and direct an economic and political and human rights campaign against Iran that undermines the legitimacy and capability of the regime so that it collapses from within — What Tom Barnett calls “the Soft Kill”?

  • Walter Russell Mead

    Hope is not a plan, and that’s what the soft kill strikes me as: a hope that the regime will fall before something horrible happens. It’s a hope that I share, and presumably the government is looking at ways to advance the concept, but my guess would be that there is not much that we can do in this department that can reliably be expected to make the kind of change that we seek. In any case, failing to confront the regime aggressively is likely to strengthen it domestically (as the Munich climb down discredited Hitler’s opponents who had argued his path was too risky).

  • Walter Russell Mead

    Thanks!!

  • George

    George Orwell summed it up nicely when he wrote ”Pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”

  • Peter

    Mead the war-monger? Sounds like it.

    So what do we do about Iran? Mead won’t say outright; he merely implies. Cute.

    I say this. If the U.S. does find that it is in our national interest to attack Iran, it should be done with suficient force to literally break that country’s back.

    And afterwards …. and this is important, Mead .. let someone else pay to pick up the pieces. The U.S. has paid enough for stuff like this since WWII.

    But what if nobody pay? Then, tough nuggies. Nation building has gone out of style. America is bankrupt, and part of the reason is all this squandering of money both domestically and in foreign affaires.

    And Mead, if it is war as you want — the war you don’t call for explicitly — then understand it should be done without your politically correct rules of engagement. Right?

    One last thing. After Iran, should we take care of Red China next??? After all, we do still have first strike capabilities.

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  • RebeccaH

    You’ve described the situation perfectly, except that I think you’re placing too much faith in the belief that Obama is merely “marking time until the hard decisions have to be made”, as opposed to “he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.”

  • Pat

    Mr. Mead,
    Make this into a book!

  • T-Max

    You have described in historical terms what John Kekes disproves in “The Illusions of Egalitarianism” – the fundamental assumption that all people are basically good unless harmful social, economic or political arrangements make them bad. Kekes is a must read for people interested in this line of thought.

  • Cromwell

    The Mullah’s profess to beleive in Hidden Imam Islamic Theology, in which they need to blow up the world to bring their messiah to them.

    So why should we let them have nukes, given what they claim to beleive? They probably wouldn’ t blow up the entire world but could blow up the Middle East, and cripple the worlds economy in the process.

    Part of the ‘hope’ strategy is to ignore the teachings of the Koran and Muhammed and the various insane Theologies such as the Mullahs and project the reasoning of Western Enlightenment(“they’d never really do this, they just want to have power and make money”).

  • http://chrisbolts.wordpress.com Chris Bolts Sr.

    I have nothing to add to this excellent analysis except I’ll post this quote from today’s WaPo:

    “‘We are very proud of our diplomacy, although we are mainly benefiting from mistakes made by the United States and its allies,’ said Kazem Jalali, a key member of the Iranian parliament’s commission on national security and foreign policy. ‘We are using all our resources to exploit these weaknesses.’ ”

    Weakness invites aggressiveness indeed.

  • Bob Miller

    The American “peace movement” is divided between those who only want to think the best of the barbarians and those who want to be barbarians themselves.

  • http://n.a. Adam Garfinkle

    And another example of Orwell’s insight, just from today’s NYT. The front page article “Afghan Strategy Shifts to Accent Civilian Projects” notes, way, way down in the story, carried over to p. A10, that the strategy involves getting more Afghans to deliver services so that the government can take credit, but notes: “Qualified Afghans who might work for the government have been scared away by a Taliban assassination campaign; others were siphoned off by the United Nations and relief groups that pay far higher salaries.” Far higher salaries = destruction of human capital available to vested authorities. Where have we heard this before, or better, where haven’t we?

  • Mike Murray

    Every few years it becomes necessary to remind the nation why we cannot proceed to complete nuclear disarmament. Charles Freeman’s “The History of Nuclear Strategy” carefully explains the often misunderstood concepts of First and Second Strike Capability. It remains one of the best guides to the complex intricacies of disarmament issues.

  • http://norwegianshooter.blogspot.com/ Norwegian Shooter

    M. Report, Theodore Geisel was quite “political” in the 40′s, and he was no goo-goo*:

    “As World War II began, Geisel turned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years as editorial cartoonist for the left-wing New York City daily newspaper, PM. Geisel’s political cartoons, later published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, opposed the viciousness of Hitler and Mussolini and were highly critical of isolationists, most notably Charles Lindbergh, who opposed American entry into the war.”

    Earl and Steve, fine points.

    Lex, agreed, an attack is not a sane option (which doesn’t preclude it being argued), but the current choice is to retain the current containment or ratchet down the sanctions to the “crippling” type. Which do you prefer?

    WRM, don’t forget to name the pre-war American goo-goos in any further posts. Or how about telling us what were “their wickedly careless interventions”?

    Adam, WRM neglected to name and shame any Americans from the 20′s and 30′s. “pacifism after it all went sour”? Is this really “irresponsible”? No. But I’d like to hear more of Dewey and Beard’s actions. (PS, you shouldn’t put “n.a.” in the website comment box. The least you could do is link your own magazine)

    Lex, good points after the second “agreed” and before “destroy the mullah regime”. Larison says WRM needs to use 1938 appeasement to cover for very weak actual arguments. So, same question, increase sanctions or stand pat?

    * Am I missing something? It couldn’t be this. Possibly musical, with the mid-century -aires suffix? I don’t get it.

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  • jbay

    Prf. Mead Wrote:
    “Hope is not a plan, and that’s what the soft kill strikes me as”

    “In any case, failing to confront the regime aggressively is likely to strengthen it domestically”

    With all do respect, is not a confrontation with aggression equally dependent on the hope that Iranians will come to their senses? The world knows the size of our military and they know exactly how far we are willing to go. Unless we are willing to cross that threshold we cannot convince anyone in Iran with aggression and isn’t this the problem?

    It seems both sides of this argument are based on wild assumptions about how the one will interpret the actions of the other and thus both are based on faulty logic. The Iranians are very clever and if we do not recognize that then we will make a bad situation worse. As was said before if the size of our arms doesn’t scare them then the threat of invasion won’t. You know what will?

    Currently there is a small mountainous region that beat the British and the Russians occupied by lawless tribes of raiders. Even the Romans had a way of removing mountains and it is true that we also have ways of removing mountains.

    Give everyone 3 weeks to leave this area, flatten it, pave it over with concrete and you will end the war and the problem with Iran simultaneously. Hannibal used vinegar, the Romans used water we can use nitro-glycerin.

  • Sparky Satori

    Since Hitler’s rise to power was financed and/or otherwise abetted by the US corporate class who thought he’d drive toward Moscow, the blood isn’t on the hands of the “peace activists,” but on the hands of those who sought to profit from the subsequent barbarity. And refrained from taking action once it became clear just how bestially inhumane the results of their investment became.

    Was it the “peace activists” who turned away boatloads of Jews? Was it “peace activists” – or corporatists like Rockefeller toady John McCloy – who prevented the bombing of concentration camps?

    Iran today is the direct result of CIA intervention there in 1953 and the subsequent inhumanity of the US-backed Shah. You cannot disclaim credit for having wrought this sad state of affairs by blaming “peace activists.”

    This isn’t an insightful essay. It’s a mentally imbalanced individual cherrypicking random data to conjure up a hodgepodge of fear and loathing to justify his own innate biases. Curtis LeMay would be proud of this tripe, but those who *aren’t* psychopaths have much to fear from its dissemination.

  • http://quite-rightly.blogspot.com/ Quite Rightly

    Wonderful piece. For those who disagree with Mead’s analysis, the question to ask is: How many lives would not have been lost if we had begun rearmament earlier and did not have to face war with Japan and Germany with a very weak military force? Or better, if we had not destroyed much of our military capability following WWI, sinking our battleships and so on? A million lives? Several million?

    We do need idealists to tug at our sleeves so that we improve ourselves. But we should never let idealists be in control. Reality is too harsh a master.

  • R. Stanten

    When Churchill wrote “The Gathering Storm” in 1948, much of the book is spent re-counting how the english pacifist movement played straight into the hands of the Nazis, and stridently opposed anyone who tried to warn of the looming catastrophe. We seem doomed to repeat this mistake. Mr. Mead sounds the alarm, but will anyone in the media listen?

  • http://www.chicagoboyz.net Lexington Green

    “… confront the regime aggressively …”

    But how?

    If we are not able to go to war with them — for reasons I listed, and which you don’t seem to disagree with — then what?

    The Soft Kill should probably be called the Non-Kinetic Kill, since the operative word is the noun “kill.” The idea is to be attacking the regime by all means possible, including a forcefully articulated statement on deterrence — that they wil suffer unilateral assured destruction if they detonate a nuke — and all methods overt and covert that enlist the support of the population to liberate themselves.

    I don’t think it makes sense to merely rely on “hope”. But I also don’t t think it makes sense to be talking, thinking and planning about military threats that we will never deliver on.

    This post has links to my earlier posts on the “Soft Kill.”

    http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5071.html

    I won’t belabor the idea further in these comments. The idea is to extract victory from this scenario. I appreciate Mr. Mead’s indulgence of my lengthy comments.

  • http://www.chicagoboyz.net Lexington Green

    I second the motion for a book on the role of the “peace movement” in the USA — but in the spirit of both Special Providence and of God and Gold, the roots of this approach must be traced back at least to the 18th Century. There has been opposition to every war that any maritime commercial country ever waged, internally. The things that the goo-goos were saying in opposition to the US occupation of the Phillipines 110 years ago sounds very, very contemporary. And the pacifist thinking of people like John Bright 160 years ago is clearly marked by the same DNA as the goo goos of the 1930s and the 2010s. This is a very deep, very important story that Mr. Mead could tell very well.

  • Soylent

    As long as we are engaging in counter-factual history; what of the utterly disasterous treaty of Versailles, without which the rise of the nazi party is difficult to imagine?

    This treaty was only possible because the US weighed in on the side of England using the sinking of Lusitania as an excuse. There is now incontrovertible evidence that she was carrying vast quantities of munitions to british troops unbenknownst to the civilian passengers.

  • Luke Lea

    Maybe a word should be given to the “do-bader’s” on the right: Nietzsche, the social Darwinists at Yale, Joseph Kennedy, whoever the warmongers were in Germany, and of course those two violent, intolerant, racist anti-Semites Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who helped bring Hitler to power.

  • http://norwegianshooter.blogspot.com/ Norwegian Shooter

    “But we should never let idealists be in control. Reality is too harsh a master.”

    Quite Rightly this describes neo-cons perfectly. I’m glad to know you opposed the war with Iraq.

    R. Stanten, the english pacifist movement had a good reason to be pacifist – The Great War. There are always warmongers, and the ones before WWII happened to be right. Since WWII (which was fairly unique, wasn’t it?), history has should that we are doomed to be goaded into more unnecessary wars, while non-intervention will always be a very hard sell.

    The bottom line here is: What about Iranian warmongers, are they proved right by the hindsight of WWII?

    WRM, “failing to confront the regime aggressively is likely to strengthen it domestically” (weak dead-horse 1938 analogy follows as proof).

    All evidence has shown that confronting the regime has strengthened it domestically. And what about the fact that the opposition, such that it is, supports the nuclear program completely? Confronting the regime is counterproductive. Period. Accept it.

  • K2K

    yes jbay, the post WW2 decision to prevent war has instead handcuffed every possible victor since. Actually, instead of neo-Genghis destruction of the Pashtuns (as you suggest), I would target North Korea. Less outrage, cuts off NK nuclear proliferation, and finally ends the Korean War.

    THEN, force the UN to devote ALL of its energies to re-drawing the post-WW1 and post-WW2 maps. Start with Kurdistan, whose self-determination was the first casualty of the Treaty of Versailles. Settle China’s border disputes with India. Re-think Pakistan. Re-unite Syria with The Lebanon.
    Re-think Iraq.

    Pause, and let the dust settle.

    These interminible, unresolved ceasefires just do not work.

  • http://??? tom kinney

    Thanks Mr. Mead for this historical corrective that has been so long in coming from the liberal side of the ledger. We’ve been force-fed a faux parallel history going back at least to the 10s and 20s that probably started with Wilson, who was the godfather of progressivism as well as the president who fought to maintain racist policies or in some cases roll back previous racial reforms; who pioneered liberal interventionism (most recently practiced by Bush in Iraq as was duly noted in a good article posted by Mr. Mead on American Interest but written by Aaron David Miller); and who has been accused of having covert KKK sympathies. And yet Wilson was an intelligent man with some laudable futuristic ideas and who was, as all of us are, ultimately a prisoner of the times in which in lived. On this, revisionism is a synonym for history itself, since each generation revists its old paradigms, but we shouldn’t read backwards from our values to those of earlier times.

    (About this father of progressivism stuff, one pundit recently noted that the subtle implication of a “progressive agenda” was the underlying notion that the constitution itself was deeply flawed and needed to be rewritten or trashed altogether.)

    The bromance between western illiberals and totalitarian regimes has long played out, disastrously, with little to no acknowledement from the media or academe. Mr. Mead has taken a big step here to help set the record straight.

    Tricking up public school history books to paper over these atrocities-by-extension; false claims or nonreporting, such as were made by a NYT Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in the 30s who knew of the Ukranian starvation epidemic (10 million died) but failed to report on it to the NYT for fear of losing his contact to Stalin; the criss-crossing of Russia during the same period by such fellow travelers as The Nation, who provided cover for Stalin on numerous occasions, while enjoying all the privileges that being hard working useful idiots provided them..all crimes of accessory that haveup to the present shaded our knowledge of these seminal, horrific events. (ow that The Nation’s useful idiots phase has ended, perhaps we should downgrade them to useless idiots. Just a thought.) But then again, they were operating in a different time, so perhaps I should cut them some slack as well.

    For those who are interested in the real history as hidden from us over the years by taildragging and dissembling media and academics, no better place to start than Jung Chang’s biography of Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story in which she claims that this sadist and pedophile who abandoned wife after wife and child after child, was responsible for the deaths in peacetime of 70 million, including his own five star starvation epidemic that was so severe that several species of animals then living in China were hunted into extinction. Another is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism where he squares the circle with tale after tale of leftist historical hypocrisies, and Bruce Bartlett’s (whose excoriating of Bush’s Iraq war was much beloved by the illiberal until he wrote…ta da) Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, that looks at how Democrats long stalled racial reform then cleverly took credit at the last moment.

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  • Linganth

    This is a very interesting article, however, I must disagree with several of the premises. First of all, I have several problems with the historical analysis being given. Yes, the Nazi regime would not have responded to peace overtures, but the reality is that peace could have been preserved had the US joined the League of Nations and the European powers had not burdened the Weimer Republic with reparation payments. Of course, the Great Depression didn’t help things along either. Of course we were at that point in time far to isolationist, yet, our actions when we do engage with other nations is that of an empire to its subjects. We ourselves are responsible for egregious human rights abuses throughout the world. Compare the Iranian regime to ours for example. Which of the two countries has been convicted in the World Court for acts of international terrorism? Not Iran. Which of the two countries have directly sponsored regime change in other countries? Not Iran, while the US can claim the Shah of Iran and almost all of Latin America, and many other dictators. My problem with the essay above is not that Iran is a good regime. Hardly that. I cannot begin to express how much distaste I feel for the Iranian regime or for radical Islam. But I am just as if not more disgusted by many of our actions abroad and many of the dictators we have sponsored. I am afraid Mr. Mead has it wrong. We are NOT the good guys, no more than any other nation is inherently “good”. We are a very powerful nation and our economic hegemony will be safeguarded, despite any human and environmental costs that will be accrued. It is perfectly within Iran’s rights to pursue peaceful uses of nuclear energy. I have seen no viable evidence that states that Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons for military purposes. The single best way to ensure that does not happen is to work closely with the Iranian regime to develop and modernize their infrastructure. But of course, that begs the question, when will the US and Israel give up theirs? That is to me far more the interesting question. Again, to sum up, I feel that the historical analysis is rather to simplistic and neglects the very real role we play in propagating wars and human rights abuses throughout our sphere of influence. After all, if we are going to hold other nations to such strict humanitarian standards in their foreign policy, we could at least make sure we meet those standards ourselves as a minimum. Turkey and Brazil did a fine job, and their agreement with Iran merited the full consideration of the UN rather than the complete dismissal it received.

  • http://norwegianshooter.blogspot.com/ Norwegian Shooter

    tom kinney,

    Goldberg circles the stupid on a regular basis, but really narrows in on it with Liberal Fascism. Dave Neiwert has put a lot of effort into pointing this out. Another long series is linked on the left sidebar right below the book cover.

    As for Bruce Bartlett’s latest book, I don’t know anything about it, but I can easily see the historical mistake you make in your comment on the subject. Every mildly informed person should know that Southern Democrats filibustered civil rights legislation for as long as they could. But after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed, the Democratic party split, with the Southern anti-civil rights politicians leaving the at least the Democratic caucus on this subject, and the South becoming a Republican stronghold over the course of the next generation.

    So you’re going to have to name names on who stalled civil rights reform and then took credit for it at the last moment.

  • http://parainglesler.com.br Americo

    Apples and Oranges and mr Mead knows it.

    Iran has to be viewed in the wider prism of the middle east and not mid 20th century Europe.

    The regime in Teheran is hanging by a thread and would have been long gone if they couldn’t use the israeli-palestinian conflict and a unilateral war in Iraq (how does that fit into the apeasement narrative?) to stoke up radical sentiment.

    Nazi Germany came to power using the rethoric of humiliation and racial supperiory and saying it would restore Germany to its former greatness. What territorial claims is Iran making?

    In Nazi Germany domestic opposition had all but been eliminated by the time of the Munich deal. In Iran the mullahs have no such control over their country.

    I cannot believe that mr Mead, as a historian, is unaware of these glaring differences. More likely he’s trying to simplify current affairs into a soundbite: “appeasement”

    A much smarter way to defeat the Iranians is engage Iranian Oposition, forcefully pursue a sollution for the Israeli Palestinian conflict and get out of Irak as soon as possible.

    Easy? no.

    But a millitary campaign against Iran would inflame the middle-east even more than it already is and empower the radicals in the region.

  • http://www.daylightresearch.com Steve

    More evidence that the ‘isms’ are really political religions. You could pick out any liberal from the crowd, trick him into reading this and he would leave the room just as confirmed in his pacifist beliefs as when he entered. Liberalism is a religion. Its world view is fixed and almost all of its adherents will die in their beliefs regardless of what happens around them.

  • NHT

    You make a strong case for Iran to arm with nuclear weapons. If they don’t a war on them will be inevitable.

    Afghanistan got attacked as it did not have any defence. Iraq got attack, it also did not have a defence. Whatever useless weapons they had were give by us, were effectively destroyed during the first gulf war, and the embargo that followed.
    Pakistan will not be attacked until their nuclear weapons are secured.
    Iran knows the deterent. We, the american public, would be better off letting Iran develop the nuclear weapons. That might be the only way for us to prevent another war in that region. We must help creat a stroger Iran and develop strong relationship with them. The will be better as friends than out current allies in that region.

  • http://www.daylightresearch.com Steve

    Re: the previous post, I rest my case.

  • Jon

    I don’t think anybody is disputing that Iran is run by thugs but does anybody really believe that sanctions will prevent it from getting a nuclear bomb? Its major weapon right now is oil. What we have to do is figure out how to contain the threat short of a war that could engulf the Middle East. Not easy.
    Why the dismissal out of hand of the Brazil/Turkey deal? What if Iran agreed to recognized Israel? (not that Israel is being helpful.) But I see an Iranian bomb as inevitable.

  • Andrew Hamilton

    FWIW, the real problem Iran poses is not its quest for nuclear weapons, per se, but its “forward strategy” against Israel. A nuclear-armed Iran with an active, viable forward strategy is a far more dangerous and destabilizing threat than a nuclear-armed Iran without Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria. To me it follows that American money and diplomacy should be aimed at breaking the Iran-Syrian axis, strengthening the anti-Syrian and pro-Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and doing everything possible to dislodge Hamas from Gaza. Broader (and vaguer) goals, like a final settlement, should wait. Arab states ought to rejoice at a determined American effort to rob Iran of its influence in the Middle East, and may find ways to help if we make it clear that’s our objective, and that we are doing so to clear the road to a viable Palestinian state. I see no evidence that this administration has a coherent strategy for attaining this objective. Instead, it seems to want to accommodate the forces it should be fighting tooth and claw.

  • jbay

    K2K,

    Please understand the context of what I’m saying. I do not want to destroy the Pashtuns.

    What I am saying is that we cannot win the way we continue to fight. I know it is a heartless thing to say but when you fight the way we do it leads to more death over the long term. The only alternatives that I can think of are to stop fighting and negotiate or break the enemies back. The second option cannot be done as long as the mountainous region between Pakistan and Afghanistan remains. I’m all for negotiating but I’m confident any treaty would be promptly broken.

    As to redrawing the lines; that would probably just lead to more wars.

  • jbay

    Trying to emphasise the… giving people time to leave… the area I’m talking about is Waziristan. It is almost impossible for a modern army to control and has been for a long time.

    http://www.economist.com/world/middleeast-africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TVTSPDPS

  • David

    Excellent article! Reminds me of an article I read a few years ago in the New Yorker. It dealt with “goo-goo” eco-tourists who were in Peru watching some endangered turtles hatch on the beach and go out to sea.

    One turtle poked its head out of the sand, looked around and began to go down to the water. An owl swooped down to eat it, and a goo-goo type ignored the guide who desperately tried to stop her, and shooed away the owl. As a consequence, the turtle made it down to the sea safely, thus signaling all the other turtle babies to come out.

    They did, and were promptly slaughtered by hundreds of predators while the frantic ecotourists failed in shooing them away.

    The guide understood that the first turtle was a tester — if it made it to the sea, things were safe. If it didn’t, then it wasn’t safe and the others should stay in the sand.

    The ecotourists, by emotionally and unreasonably interfering in nature, killed thousands of turtles — but they did protect one.

  • Brian R. McCann

    Iran can be appeased in the same manner the Taliban can be persuaded not to hang 7 year old children. The Kabuki dance that is “Iranian relations” has been going on for 40 plus years. Appeasement by us is viewed as a victory by them. The mistaken assumption that is being made by all is that Iran as a counterparty to the resolution has a some trigger that will entice them join modern society. It will not happen until Israel is gone, they own Iraq’s oil fields, and are a threat fully capable nuclear threat.

  • Rick Jones

    The author has made a very strong argument against appeasing the mullahs in Iran.

    WRM’s exposition of the historical antecedants of today’s appeasement are both very convincing and informative. No doubt that there are college age readers who do not appreciate how much damage the peace movement has made over the years.

    All actions have consequences and wanting something like peace or wealth are not the same as actually creating the conditions to achieve them.

    We, the capitalistic democracies, know how to preserve peace. It is by being prepared for war and willing to fight when necessary.

    Ronald Reagan said it best when he explained that we don’t fear the Soviet Union because we have arms, we have arms because we fear the Soviet Union. This is pretty elementary. Even a wooly-headed leftist should be able to figure this out.

    Thus the question remains what to do with Iran ? Sanctions will not work. Diplomacy has not worked and will not work. Doing nothing will only result in a mushroom cloud.

    There are only two choices: regime change or the removal of Iran’s ability to become a nuclear power.

    The former will take time. And time is not our friend. The regime looks shaky but regime change could take years like it did in Poland.

    Making it impossible for Iran to develop nuclear weapons can only be achieved by physically removing Iran’s nuclear facilities and disabling their ability to attack us in Iraq and make trouble in the Persian Gulf or in co-operation with our friends to force the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons plans by squeezing Iran via a naval blockade and forcing the regime to give up their nuclear weapons program or face an economic collapse.

    Attacking Iran could be problematic when one considers the blowback from the regime and its enablers afterwards. It might be technically difficult to destroy all weapons sites. It also might take the steam out of the sails of the revolutionary opposition that seeks to remove the current regime.

    A better solution may be to blockade Iran from all necessary imports such as gasoline and other goods along with a cut to all western banking ties. The US and its allies would need to carry this out on a long term basis. Only by openly killing their nuclear weapons program would the blockade end.

    I have real doubts that the Obama Administration has the vision or the fortitude to carry out anything like this.

    We will probably get stuck with a nuclear Iran and our subsequent containment regime willl be far more costly to us than to Iran. But Obama never cares about the cost of anything to the American taxpayer. Most of Obama’s voters do not pay taxes.

    We will then have to rely on regime change. This could take years if not a decade.

    Not a lot of good choices here.

  • melvin polatnick

    The dream of an entire world following sharia law is gaining popularity in Iran and in nearby nations, it is frightening. There is little the West can do except watch in horror as this tsunami expands. The first wave is now hitting tiny Israel as it desperately tries to hold back the flood waters of Islamic fundamentalism.

  • Joe

    Interesting article. Interesting comments. Frankly, I side with the war-mongers, in that, Iran will not be appeased.

    There is a similarity between the regimes of Nazi Germany and Theocracy Iran, seemingly overlooked. It is the reason neither the Nazis nor the mullahs can be appeased. They both follow a plan to a specific objective; destroying the European Jews.

    The peaceniks all believe these enemies think rationally, which is to say, like we do. This shows how irrational peaceniks are and why they so stridently admit to their rightness and superiority.

    The Nazis and the Iran regime will stop at nothing to destroy the European (descended) Jews. Their eventual demise in doing so is irrelevant to the mission. Hitler took the Germans into a death-spiral and came close to achieving his mission. I expect the Iran regime to attempt no less, no matter what the World says or does.

    The funniest headline I have read throughout my life is: “Middle East Peace is Near”! Yes, my friends, Middle East Peace is as near as the horizon and will always be.

    The history of the United States and all the bad we have done to the World, by offering freedom, has nothing to do with this. And, you can talk about tin-pot dictators all day long, peaceniks, I’m surprised you didn’t throw in our slaughter of the Indians! But, for the Arab-Israeli conflict, the US is peripheral to the designs of the Muslims.

    It would matter not one whit who ruled Iran or any other Muslim nation. All Muslim nations seek the destruction of Israel. And, don’t tell me Egypt and Jordan are exceptions because they have treaties.

    The United States may be a hindrance, a bump in the road, but not something to stop the ‘mission’ of the Muslims.

    The peaceniks also subscribe to the vast complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The phrase even makes it sound as if the conflict is political, but it isn’t. Nor is it complex. If you want to solve the so called, Arab-Israeli (Muslim-Israeli) conflict, answer one question: Who was the legitimate son of Abraham?

  • Charles Oltorf

    Thanks, Mr Mead, for telling it like it is. At best it may be said on behalf of pacifist-appeaser movement that it represents a very small minority of Americans and therefore it cannot by itself influence policy. When this movement has been successful, it has done so because it has been joined by millions of people who are not normally pacifist-appeasers but who are appalled at ill-advised military adventurism by U.S governments (e.g., Vietnam and Iraq). However, the historic record of this movement is just as you say it is. Furthermore, as you of course know, it is becoming increasing clear that the “history” by which the pacifists attempt to justify their views is simply not supported by the most recent scholarly investigations into what actually happened. For example, Germany effectively avoided paying the “punitive” reparations which often were regarded as the justification for Nazi aggression (reference: The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson). It is also extremely unlikely that anything that the U.S. had to do with Mohammed Mosaddeq has anything at all to do with the hostility shown to our country by the present Iranian government. The many adverse comments about this article on this web-site all display numerous errors of fact regarding the historical events of the twentieth century. It is high time that the pacifist movement be recognized as the misinformed and misguided tragedy of errors that it most certainly is.

  • http://dailydishwater.wordpress.com Justquoting

    The analysis here is actually consistent with George Orwell’s essay “In Front of Your Nose.”

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  • Robert

    I fear that Barack Obama will be the first president since Woodrow Wilson whose policies will lead to the deaths of over 1 million people. Not during his presidency but in the years afterward.

  • http://michaelturton.blogspot.com Michael Turton

    I think it is delightful that The American Interest is encouraging the genre of historical fantasy, a field in which Mr. Mead shows a promising talent. But I think there is much that he left out.

    Take Japan. It’s well known that peaceniks and professors laid the basis of the Imperial Japanese Navy. For example, Peacenik Shipyards in Britain built the IJN’s first battleships, and it was a peacenik engineer from France who supervised its emergence as a world power. Professors and Peaceniks in that latter nation also built many ships for the Japanese Navy as well. Later peaceniks from the US got into the game, and supplied the IJN with submarines, and even sent over some professor engineers to help the Japanese with the new technology. Corporate capitalists opposed all this but Alas! Peaceniks ruled Amerika, and the corporations had no influence over policy.

    Fast forward to the 1930s, where a world crisis engineered by Peacenik financial houses had weakened all the industrial democracies. Japan invaded China. At that time, as every child knows, China was ruled by the Peacelords, who had close connections to the Peacenik organizations and their interests based in Shanghai, whose representives enjoyed every vice imaginable while partying with Chinese girls in retro 1930s Shanghai costume. The Peacelords ruled every province and in some there were more than one Peaceload, meaning they were Especially Peaceful. In fact with Peace prevailing throughout the land, the poor Chinese people had nothing to do but smoke opium and the only males remaining were a gaggle of eunuchs left over from the Qing Imperial Court. It was easy for the Japanese to smash their way into China.

    Over the protests of the corporate capitalists, the dreaded Peacenik Organizations fostered world war by supply Japan in its China war effort, with 80% of its oil, the advanced machine tools and aluminum it needed to make aircraft, as well as aviation technology, and of course, the scrap metal that would make weapons for killing millions of Chinese and other Asians, along with tens of thousands of good American boys. Peacenik auto makers established factories there and their vehicles were later used by the Japanese Army to help it kill Americans. Corporate America protested this, but the Peaceniks were too powerful, and could not be gainsayed.

    Mead should probably show how the Peaceniks exported much technology to Russia as well, from before WWII to deep into the Cold War. Remember when the Peaceniks sold the Sovs the secret of how to make high octane gas? Or transferred technology for making submarine propellers quieter? Corporate America protested, but the power of the Peaceniks continued.

    Of course, on the domestic front the Peacenik Organizations were active as well. Who can forget General Smedley Butler’s 1937 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he said that Peaceniks like Prescott Bush and other prominent Peaceniks had offered to pay him to lead a Mussolini style coup against the US government. Fortunately Butler, who recalled with great fondness the days he had warred on behalf of corporate America, was a good corporate capitalist and refused these detestable Peaceniks.

    Of course Hitler came to borrow bankrolled by Peacenik organizations in his own nation, who hoped to use him to advance the cause of Peace. After he invaded Poland Peacenik organizations flooded into occupied Poland to carry out Peaceful activities there. This is well documented in the Steven Spielberg film Swindler’s Pissed, in which drunken con man “Boxcar” Swindler uses Jews as slaves in his Peacenik manufacturing facilities making dual-use technology, until he suffers a change of heart to corporate capitalism and works to save his workers. The rescued Jews then hare off to Palestine, which was mysteriously empty at the time, and live happily ever after there working their own Peacenik organizations which sell military technology to China and other freedom-loving states.

    Naturally I haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of Peacenik evil. While corporate America shunned any contact with the evil Hitler regime, with IBM leading the way by refusing to supply the Nazis with the information technology they needed to manage their Holocaust killings, Peacenik Organizations like IG Farben erected facilities using slave labor from death camps and worked hand in glove with the Hitler regime. Peacenik organizations also supplied the gas for the killing machine. Of course, corporate capitalists protested this, but Hitler had them all killed and had his administration staffed with peaceniks and pacifists, all of whom were professors, except for Einstein, who fled to America out of his deep devotion to corporate capitalism.

    Today we are fortunate to have corporate America in the forefront of protests against the evil Peacenik Organizations like Halliburton, who was just busted selling nuclear technology to Iran, or as Defense News noted in an article citing noted Peacenik Larry Wortzel of Heritage:

    +++
    In their drive to kill Taiwan’s request for new F-16s, China is ignoring direct dialogue with senior U.S. defense officials, preferring instead to influence Washington through retired U.S. generals, Wortzel said.

    “The Chinese side understands that the United States participants are now senior retired officers with deep ties to major corporations and boards that do business with China,” Wortzel said.
    ++++

    Luckily corporate America employs retired generals in its dealing with China to sell advanced technology to China and lobby the US government on China policy! Otherwise Peacenik organizations might be there, probably leading to a third world war from they will again somehow profit, despite corporate America’s most patriotic efforts.

    And don’t even get me started on the notorious Peacenik organization British Peace and its treatment of the Gulf of Mexico.

    Very enjoyable story, Mr. Mead!

    Michael
    PS: I have taken the liberty of sending your manuscript to a friend who is a reader for Tor, a well known publisher of historical fantasy. I am sure he will like it.
    PPS: I think it is soooo appropriate that you have the Henry Kissinger Chair. Kissinger’s tragic failure to halt the political killings in Chile and elsewhere at the behest of Corporate America against the horrible Peaceniks are probably why he had to retire in disgrace, take a post at an obscure northeastern university, and open a consulting business in China. Poor fellow.

  • http://michaelturton.blogspot.com Michael Turton

    One of President Obama’s first acts was to remove Churchill’s bust from the White House. This essay makes that action appear chilling, indeed.

    Comment by Ken Smith – June 9, 2010 @ 8:43 am
    +++++

    Mr Smith should try Google one of these days:

    “Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair following the September 11 attacks. A bust of Abraham Lincoln–Obama’s historical hero–now sits in its place.”

    Yes, replacing Churchill with the well-known peacenik Lincoln, who totally caved to the South, thus giving us the divided America we experience today.

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  • ErisGuy

    When you have lead a revolutionary army that defeats a mighty empire and when you have served two terms as president of a democracy, then I will weigh your opinion on whether the USA should accept rather than reject ‘entangling alliances.’

    I don’t believe Obama’s policies concerning Iran are the product of delusional pacifism. He is charting the course he wishes to chart.

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