The Mythology of Munich

If FDR had pulled a few Marine regiments out of Nicaragua, and sent them to throw the Germans out of the Rhineland, the German Army would have had Schickelgruber (Hitler) bumped off. The left of today would have groused about FDR's warmongering. How dare he start a war against an outlaw regime that is breaking its treaty obligations!.

FDR's quasi-fascist economic policies kept the US in depression, and this led to greater timidity in foreign relations. Once both were shown to be abject failures, the Left adopted them as the best thing to do now and in the future.

In the Mythology of Munich, Evan thomas tries to deny the parallel between current events in the Middle East vis a vis Iran and Hitler's Germany in the 1930's. The parallel is all too clear, but like Chamberlain et al in the 1930's they choose to ignore the threat. The different view that McCain and Obama hold is a reflection of experience vs naivete. Evans states in his article that "Obama denies the entire premise of McCain's challenge and thinks that Ahmadinejad may be deplorable, but he is no Hitler. One must remember that Hitler was not Hitler either until he had the war machine necessary to begin the conquest of Europe and bring to fruition his dream of a thousand year Reich. In the same manner, Ahmadinejad will not become Ahmadinejad until he aquires nuclear weapons and achieves his goal of destroying Israel. Negotiation has never worked and diplomacy has always failed when dealing with despots, tyrants, and dictators. They will weave your good natured intentions and treaties into a rope wtth which they will hang you with.

Evans mentions the Bay of Pigs, but forgets to note that Kennedy that withdrew critical air support just before the invasion because he wanted the cover of "plausible deniablity" about US invlovement in that operation. Thomas also forgets to give credit where credit is due. It was not the diplomatic acumen of Kennedy that difused the Cuban Missile Crisis. That credit goes to KGB Col. Oleg Penkofsky who gave the US critical information about the capablitiesof the Soviet strategic rocket forces that enabled Kennedy to negotiate forcefully with Soviet leader Niktita Khruschev, difusing that potential nuclear imbroglio.

Thomas is correct in stating that Regan was able to negotiate with Soviet leaders because he was dealing from a position of strength. Which should be remembered by those FSO wimps over at State who seem to think that diplomacy will always prevail. It does. But only after you have beaten you adversary decively on the field of battle. The prospect of going to war should always rest heavily on the mind of the man who has to send those troops into battle. But the reason that war is so horrible and the casuality rate is so high is because diplomats nuture the solution to the problem in the womb of political debate, allowing the enemy to amass his army and weapons enabling him to deal from a positon of strength the high cards of his diabolical machinations.

The IAEA has stated what Iran has tried to deny. That they are pursuing the enrichment of uranium to achieve their goal of building nuclear weapons. We stand at the edge of the abyss. If we do not want to repeat the mistakes of history, then we must learn from the past and deal forcefully with the threat that we face in the present. Or, like Chamberlain we will lament as he did in 1939, "Everything I have hoped for, everything I have dreamed of, everything I have worked toward, has crashed in flames".

Evan Thomas??? article is a brilliant reason that we should not look to Munich or Vietnam for answers to our current problems. However,. Evans believes that Reagan was able to negotiate with the USSR because of our super-defenses. That???s very bad history. Actually, Reagan???s defense program bankrupted our economy, and it paved the way for outrageous graft, profiteering, and corruption (like $700 toilet seats) - a precedent for the current Iraqi war.

Actually, by the time Reagan got into office, and certainly by the 1986 - the year of Reagan???s famous ???tear-down-the-wall speech, the USSR was already unsustainable. The fall of the so-called ???Evil Empire??? was simply a matter of time. The reason for the demise of the USSR was that it was ruled by a bunch of ossified old men who could not see the need to change. For some 70 years the USSR was a victim of its own bad history, its lies, its denials, its coverups. Reagan???s defense spending really had a minor impact compared to the destruction the USSR inflicted on itself by its own delusions.

The same idea applies to our current nemesis, Iran. Obama has the presence of mind to understand what the Islamic Republic is really like. He???s also smart enough to understand that the current government of Iran, like the USSR, has a number of weaknesses. The rule of the mullahs is increasingly unpopular, particularly among the young. We need to capitalize on those weaknesses. The real key to negotiating with Iran is how fast we can de-carbonize our economy. The faster we can develop alternative fuels (they do exist and corn ethanol is NOT the answer.), the more powerful our hand will be in negotiating with Iran and other countries in the Middle East. Telling the Iranians and Arabs to keep their crude is one of our major trump cards.

The other trump card is a leader who appeals to young people with message of hope and change. If we can project our country as a nation of hope and change, we will have terrorists on the run everywhere. Obama understands that concept. McCain, our equivalent of Brezhnev, just doesn???t get it. And he never will. Unless we want to end up like the late great USSR, we need to elect Obama with a landslide vote.

P.S. A few years ago, Spiegel, a German magazine, published an interview with a French demographer, Emmanuel Todd, who preducted the downfall of the USSR in 1979. Todd is also predicting the downfall of the United States. If you read the article, you???ll discover that we are right on schedule with everything that Todd predicted. Our only hope for survival is a drastic change.

No one questions whether Israel, which has about 100-200 nuclear warheads and is exempt from inspection by outside agencies, has a right to nuclear weapons, power, etc, however, Iran is not allowed to develop such technologies. But then again we live in the United States of America, land of double standards, where terrorism is as Chomsky says, "what our leaders declare it to be". It seems incomprehensible to me that in an age of such techonological advancement where information is just a click away, we still have people believing the propaganda that is spoon-fed to them by FOX News and CNN.

Even Thomas distorts history in this article. I am going to set the record straight on how the US got involved in Vietnam:

Ike went to the Geneva Convention in 54, at which he agreed to "take over" from the French colonialists after they got massacred at Diem Bien Phu. Ike immediately sent Green Berets, CIA, and OSS to train the Southern Vietnamese Army and to cull dissent so that the ???communist forces??? of the North would not succeed in taking over the whole country. Ike, like Truman before him, refused to recognize Ho Chi Minh and his nationalist movement because Ho Chi Minh had worked in the Soviet Government and had served as a military advisor to Communist China. (Remember that 54 was the pinnacle of McCarthyism, so it is hard to blame Ike for his political stance.) The CIA then worked from 54-55 to prevent the free elections that were to take place in 56 as stipulated by the 54 Geneva Convention. It is estimated, by Eisenhower himself, that up to 80 percent of Vietnamese would vote for Ho Chi Minh and not the CIA???s puppet in the south: Ngo Dinh Diem. Johnson did not get us into Vietnam ??? We were already there NINE years prior to Johnson???s assumption of the Presidency.

The only reason I can see for Evan Thomas??? misrepresentation of history is the sentence in the article where he says that Johnson ???immediately distrusted the Harvard men he had inherited from Kennedy??? and then he goes on to vilify Johnson as the catalyst for the Vietnam War. Perhaps Thomas believes that the reader will see Johnson???s distrust of the Harvard men as the critical mistake that lead to the quagmire of Vietnam (which would be completely incorrect, of course). However, if a reader did not recognize Thomas??? historical misrepresentations, they might be more likely to trust the current Harvard man (Obama) to have good judgment and lead us out of the quagmire of Iraq.

Does MSNBC have any editors that value truth and objectivity?

What is this fascination with the need for a candidate to have balls. Even James Carville said that Hillary has them. I believe that she is Chelsea's mother and that Bill is the father. The rule is only one set of balls to a couple, and as father, Bill wins. Besides, we do not elect a president to breed things. It is brains that we should be looking for in a candidate if we have to get biological about it. Maybe that's how we got Bush. People neglected to look for the right biological equipment.

Do you know the story of hijack of an Indian Airlner on the Eve of Christmas 1999? Taliban assisted Kashmir insugents hijacked the airplane and took it to .. Kandahar. The Indian govt talked with these scums and released the hostages. But nobody did anything against the terrorist supporting Taliban govt, who gave support to these terrorists.. If somebody acted with force, at that time... 9 -11 would n't have happened. But no, nobody wanted to take the trouble. So, they got more courage , trained more hijackers and tried to kill up to 50,000 people in US main land. All because USA vetoed an UN vote against Israel. Tell me now, you peace lovers, do you want to go and wipe Ahmadinajad's and the Mullah's bottom?

Of course, there have been two "Munichs" - not one. The first was Chamberlain's; the second was in 1972 when the world supinely allowed the Israeli wrestling team to be murdered by terrorists with no response. We have been appeasing terrorists ever since with the perfectly predictable result of more and more terrorism that is ever more violent.

If we continue on the path of appeasement of the terrorists, it is perfectly predictable that they will one day get and use the bomb. This should be obvious to anyone, even a Newsweek columnist.

We have tried appeasement as a tactic for decades and it clearly is counterproductive when applied to Islamic terrorism. Clinton tried to negotiate with Yasser Araftat and this resulted in a wave of terrorism throughout the 1990s against the US and also produced the Second Intifada in Israel. The final result was 9-11 and 3,000 dead Americans and, finally, war.

And no. There is no chance of any successful negotiation with Iran because we are not in a position of strength but rather in a position of weakness. We are importing , literally, tens of billions of dollars of oil per day and it would be difficult to imagine a weaker posistion from which to negotiate - except by making it clear that any military option is "off the table" from the beginning - which is precisely what the Democrats have done.

The country may be divided right now between "appeasers" and "fighters." If Obama wins he will have the same choice Churchill said Chamberlain had: Chamberlain's choice was between "....war and dishonor. He chose dishonor...and will have war soon."

This debate should have ended not later than 9-12-2001. There is no way to appease these fanatics. They must be removed before they get the bomb. That we are led by people who refuse to see this reality is truly frightening.

Dear One, I agree with you about the horrible social conditions in Iran. I have two things to say about that. One is, Americans need to be VERY CAREFUL not to let the religious right wing take over the Supreme Court, considering that Iran shows you what it really looks like when a nation fails to separate church and state. The second point is that WE, the USA, put those nut jobs in power by placing the Shah in power then controlling his government as a puppet, which infuriated the Iranian people. The Iranian people rebelled against such imperialism, and in the middle of this secular political rebellion, the Ayatollahs seized power. Not to mention the very cogent fact that WE, the USA, gave Iran their first nuclear reactor. Oh, yeah. We forgot all about that. Now we are threatening to bomb them for possessing technology that WE gave them?

And what is all this nonsense about Iran attacking Israel? Iran has been at war with Iraq for decades, and never succeeded in even taking over a neighboring province. How are they going to fight a long distance war with Israel? Iran does NOT have significant military force to back up a nuclear strike, even if it were stupid enough to indulge in one, even if it already had the warheads, which it does not.

And ask yourself, who has strengthened the religious fanatics that control Iran? The USA. First, we give them nuclear power, then we set up conditions for the Ayatollahs to seize power, then we plunge Iraq into civil war and destroy Iraq's infrastructure, which effectively disables Iran's greatest enemy. Furthermore, Bush refuses to have diplomatic relations, only worsening the situation. And McCain threatens to bomb Iran, which is even stupider (and much more real) than Iran threatening to bomb Israel. We have no one but ourselves to blame for the horrible situation in the middle east.

VOTE FOR OBAMA to end all this needless drama.

An incredibly large piece of history is missing in this article concerning the weakness of John F. Kennedy regarding the overthrow of Batista in Cuba, the rise of Castro, the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs and JFK's obvious lack of negotiating acumen when he met Khruschev in 1961 which is understood by many historians to have been the opening for the establishment of the Berlin Wall. Obama's clear lack of experience and judgement

I second what hayden23 wrote.
When are you going to unhook that big wet sloppy kiss on Osama posterior that you people have going.
Some guy write a book in 2008 about the 1930's and you just throw out everything else written. Could it be that it suits your point of view?