Mitt Romney once speechified: "Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy. He believes America's role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. I believe a strong America must - and will - lead the future." John McCain's intentions regarding Iran weren't at all subtle either.
If only our president could be more like Nixon and Reagan who "appeased" the Chinese and the Soviets respectively but called it "iron will" or some such.
Schoolchildren study the post-war (WWII - they do tend to run together) memories of Neville Chamberlain and the fate of caving in to an expansionist dictator.
It's a story told as though that attempt to make deals was an obvious mistake that even minute levels of circumspection could have avoided. I'm not here to argue differently, in fact it is so stipulated, because 20/20 hindsight is such a powerful thing.
Negotiation being akin to appeasement, British refusal to share revenues from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. led to deposing Mossadeq (a joint venture with our CIA) and the installation of the Shah in 1953. A joint Israeli-French-British invasion of Egypt in 1956, in lieu of a 15 year transition to sovereignty over the Suez Canal for the newly created republic was sold to home audiences to a large degree with cries of Munichism. Though thwarted eventually by US and UN pressure, the canal was made impassable for a time and the whole operation gave the Soviets cover to invade Hungary and provided them an entree into Middle Eastern affairs, to the detriment of western interests.
Subscribers to the domino theory, which caught fire and led to lines in the sand in SE Asia in the sixties, used that hyper-volatile word to cause the Vietnam War, because it was made to seem unfathomable that anti-colonialism there was at all related to our own history in that regard.
And who can forget Dick Cheney and the cabal, spooking legislators into going along with the preemptive invasion of Iraq, using words which only hinted at what Huckabee felt comfortable blurting. Oven doors indeed!
Today's news and many more to come will be stuffed to the gills with Congresspersons lecturing our secretary of state (a Vietnam veteran) and our president on the dangers of not resolving to go to war yet again, which is all a better deal can possibly be about. Because trusting but verifying can only be coherent if a Republican advocates them.
Remember the lessons of Munich, they demand, as though they had already attained such clarity of retrospection. The rest of us know, of course, that claims to know the future are the fruits of madness and nobody in favor of the treaty could have the level of certainty with which to counter them. Which is why the merits of the Iran negotiations will inescapably be hard pressed to enter the thought processes of those with minds made up to be, first and foremost, anti-appeasers. Minds so made up as to make reading the treaty's provisions unnecessary before denouncing it into the nearest media receptacle.
The savvy reader can always just do a simple search for the White House's "Historic Deal that Will Prevent Iran from Acquiring a Nuclear Weapon." It addresses the most common concerns in plain language. Sans the feck.
