As noted in the bit yesterday about the winger radio host who - like so many wingers - shouts “appeasement! appeasement” without having any idea what “appeasement” actually means - let alone the historical context - I’m amused by this piece today, about how Teh Leader dusted off some 69-year-old comments by a long-dead Idaho senator to make his point:
Being dead since 1940 hasn’t kept Idaho U.S. Sen. William Borah from being inserted squarely into 2008 presidential politics after Democratic candidate Barack Obama took issue with President Bush’s borrowing of a quote from Borah….
<snip>
“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” Bush told Israeli lawmakers, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
<snip>
The Borah reference “got across exactly what he (Bush) wanted to get across,” said Bill Smith, director of The Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution at the University of Idaho, which runs the annual Borah Symposium lecture at the Moscow, Idaho, school.
It makes political sense, but making Borah and his 1939 comments the poster child for foolhardy Nazi appeasement, then connecting the dots to the current presidential race, is a dicey intellectual proposition.
Conservatism, these days, is itself a dicey intellectual proposition.
But it strikes me that the shoe might well be on the other foot in this case. We liken Iran to Nazi Germany, even though the latter, at the time of the Blitzkreig, possessed the mightiest military on earth by a long shot. It’s laughable to even suggest that Iran is in the same league; but the wingers will say, well, it’s not about military might; it’s about intentions.
Fine. But what of our own intentions?
If in fact it is the specific goal of the United States to dominate the Middle East militarily (or put our allies in a better position to do so) in order to ensure both the physical safety of Israel and our own unfettered access to oil - is there any amount of talking that can dissuade us from this?
Ah, right. The United States is only in the Mideast for magnanimous reasons; sure. Every country - even Nazi Germany itself - tells itself the same thing, you understand. The great powers jockey for position. Seeing an opportunity to better their own lot, they seize it. We have.
So - can we be “appeased?”
Our own intentions obviously include war and “regime change” in Iran, if not also Syria - just as in Iraq. The neoconservatives have made plain their desire to do this, though of course their bloody intentions will result in countless additional lives lost, billions if not additional trillions spent - and unintended consequences galore.
Can these intentions be thwarted? Would it not be legitimate, in Iran at this very moment, for policymakers to be having the exact same debate over whether the United States can be talked out of attacking, can be dissuaded from its aggressive intentions?
I’m certain there are Iranian “conservatives” who say that to try and talk the mightiest military on earth from carrying out its aggressive intentions is foolhardy. Which is why, perhaps, Iran might legitimately be interested in making a deal.
And that, then, explains why BushMcCain and the rest of the neoconservatives won’t talk with them.
It’s not that Iran can’t be contained.
It’s that the neocons themselves cannot be appeased.
