[A-List] UK appeasement of US imperialism

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The opponents of war on Iraq are not the appeasers

If Blair wanted to steer the US away from conflict, he is clearly failing

Seumas Milne
Thursday February 13, 2003
The Guardian

The split at the heart of Nato over George Bush's plans to invade Iraq has
triggered an outpouring of charges of 1930s-style appeasement against those
resisting the rush to war. A line of attack hitherto largely confined to US
neo-conservatives has now been taken up by their increasingly desperate
fellow travellers on this side of the Atlantic.

On Tuesday, Jack Straw warned that if the west failed to use force against
Iraq it would be following "one of the most catastrophic precedents in
history", when Britain and France "turned a blind eye" to the fascist
dictators' subversion of international law. Tony Blair alluded to the same
period when he insisted that "all our history - especially British history"
points to the lesson that if international demands are not backed up with
force, the result is greater insecurity. Both were taking their cue from US
hawks like Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed millions died in the 1940s because
some countries had thought there wasn't "enough evidence" to be sure about
Hitler's intentions.

Rightwing tabloids in both Britain and the US - where France and Germany's
bid to avert war has aroused something close to political hysteria - have
now gone even further in their determination to see the current crisis
through a second world war prism. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post demanded to
know: "Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their soldiers
on the line to fight today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?" In Britain, the Daily
Mail accused France and Germany of "unforgivable betrayal", while the Tory
defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin declared that, without the US, "we would
not have won the second world war".

Hitler analogies have long been the stock-in-trade of Anglo-American war
propaganda - perhaps not surprisingly, since the second world war still
retains near-universal legitimacy, just as Nazi Germany remains the
archetype of an aggressive, genocidal state. Nasser was the first to be
branded the new Hitler in the 1950s, while those who opposed the Suez war
were damned as appeasers. But there have been a string of others, from Ho
Chi Minh to Gaddafi, Milosevic to Mullah Omar. All were compared to Hitler
while British or US bombs rained down on their countries. Just how devalued
this currency has become was on show this week when the Tory historian
Andrew Roberts argued that the Iraqi regime should be equated with the Nazis
because both had "gassed their racial and political enemies" and Iraq fires
at British and US aircraft patrolling the illegal no-fly zones over its
territory.

It would be tempting to put these latest invocations of the second world war
down to ignorance if it wasn't that those making them clearly know better.
What they are in fact engaged in is a crude attempt to rewrite 20th century
European history to justify a war of aggression in the Middle East. The
parallel between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Nazi Germany is transparently
ridiculous. In the late 1930s, Hitler's Germany was the world's second
largest industrial economy and commanded its most powerful military machine.
It openly espoused an ideology of territorial expansion, had annexed the
Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia in rapid succession and posed a direct
threat to its neighbours. It would go on to enslave most of Europe and carry
out an industrial genocide unparallelled in human history.

Iraq is, by contrast, a broken-backed developing country, with a single
commodity economy and a devastated infrastructure, which doesn't even
control all its own territory and has posed no credible threat to its
neighbours, let alone Britain or the US, for more than a decade. Whatever
residual chemical or biological weapons Iraq may retain, they are clearly no
deterrent, its armed forces have been massively weakened and face the most
powerful military force in history - Iraq's military spending is estimated
to be about one per cent of the US's $380bn budget. The attempt to equate
the Iraqis' horrific gas attacks on Kurds and Iranians during the Iran-Iraq
war with the Nazi holocaust is particularly grotesque - a better analogy
would be the British gassing of Iraqi Kurds in the 20s or the US use of
chemical weapons in Vietnam.

Appeasement is in any case a misnomer for what was an attempt by rightwing
governments in Britain and France in the 1930s to befriend Germany and
accommodate Nazi expansion. There was certainly a widespread yearning for
peace in the aftermath of the butchery of the first world war. But the
appeasers were something else: effectively a pro-German fifth column at the
heart of the conservative elite, who warmed to Hitler's militant
anti-communism and sought to encourage him to turn on the Soviet Union.
Chamberlain even hoped for an alliance with Nazi Germany. Fascist sympathies
were rampant throughout the establishment, from Edward VIII to newspapers
like the Mail which now denounce opponents of war on Iraq as traitors -
while mavericks like Churchill and what would now be called the hard left
resisted the Munich sellout. In none of this is there the remotest analogy
with current efforts to prevent an unprovoked attack on sanctions-drained
Iraq. And of course none of the opponents of appeasement in the 1930s ever
argued for pre-emptive war on Nazi Germany, but for deterrence and
self-defence.

Just as absurd, against the background of the European-US standoff, is the
increasingly strident insistence of the war party that it was the US which
saved Europe from Nazi tyranny in the 1940s. It isn't necessary in any way
to minimise the heroism of US soldiers to balk at such a retrospective
reworking of the facts. Quite what the Russians - who lost perhaps 27
million people in the second world war (compared with 135,576 US deaths in
Europe), bore the brunt of the European fighting and, in Churchill's words,
"tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine" - are supposed to make of this
fable is anyone's guess. Particularly when Russia - along with France,
Germany and China - is opposing the current war drive and is presumably
therefore regarded by war supporters as ranked among the appeasers.

The idea that those opposed to US aggression against Iraq can be compared to
the appeasers of the 1930s is simply risible. But if appeasement - unlike
the form it took in the 1930s - is regarded as an attempt to pacify a
powerful and potentially dangerous power, it sounds far more like the
behaviour of Tony Blair's government towards the Bush administration. Of
course Bush's America cannot be compared with Nazi Germany - it is far more
in the traditional imperial mould. But Britain's apparent attempt to steer
the US away from unilateral action, if that is what it has been, shows every
sign of failing. Instead, Blair has ended up lining up behind a hard-right
US republican administration with the political heirs of Mussolini and
Franco in the teeth of British and global opinion - and helped to fracture
the US-dominated post-1991 global order into the bargain.