Neville Chamberlain in Reverse

History is filled with figures that are remembered for just one thing, one moment, one utterance. One such figure in 20th century history is Neville Chamberlain, who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940. He will be remembered centuries hence for one moment, his return from negotiations with Adolph Hitler in September 1938 upon which he famously proclaimed:

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.

A year later Hitler added Poland to his European conquests and the U.K. declared war, finding itself on the ropes and in national peril. Since then every politician from the U.K., U.S. and otherwise who wants to remind people of the dangers of naivate in foreign relations, uses the dapper and moustached Prime Minister who appeased Hitler as their warning symbol. Winston Churchill, the man who rallied wartime Great Britain, became his successor.

Now history has another example to complete the set, George W. Bush. Where Chamberlain symbolizes what can go wrong when a leader naively understates the nation’s risk from a foreign adversary, Bush has shown us how bad a government can botch things when it naively overstates the threat of a foreign adversary.

1938: I believe it is peace for our time.

2003: Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to posses and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

As it turns out, naivete can be equally at home among both pacifists and war-makers. The way to protect the nation is not just about being strong but being smart. As the Bush adventure in Iraq shows, being strong and stupid doesn’t work out so good for anyone.

The New York Times reported yesterday than in his news conference this week on Iraq President Buish referred to Al Qaeda 30 times. Once the war was justified on the presence of weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Then it was justfied on the liberation of a people who look less liberated every day. Now it is justified on the fact that Iraq has become an Al Qaeda safe haven. Before the U.S. invasion Al Qaeda didn’t exisit in Iraq. If it has a major presence there today, we can thank Mr. Bush, who has become the terrorist network’s recruiter-in-chief.

Mr. Bush’s ‘surge’ of new U.S. troops to Iraq is the war-making version of a gambler insisting on the wisdom of putting down more chips to chase the stacks he has already lost. This week, in the face of a new report from the military and State Department that shows things still stuck in ‘bad and getting worse’, Mr. Bush declared that he will accept no timeline on troop withdrawal even if things continue to get worse. Translation: I am going to bet, and bet, and bet and I don’t really care how many more people lose their lives. Now even such foreign policy radicals as Republican Senator Richard Lugar have abandoned the sinking Bush ship.

Some of his harsher critics have accused Mr. Bush of harboring fantasies of being Jesus. Whether that is true I can’t say, but it does seem clear he fancies himself as the modern day Churchill, standing strong in the face of harsh challenges.

History, I think, will actually record him instead as Prime Minister Chamberlain’s sad flipside – a 21st century emblem for what happens when you take the nation to war on wishful thinking and refuse, in the face of all evidence, to come to grips with reality.