Free Republic

On this day, in 1938, the British and French Prime Ministers signed the Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler in an effort to avoid the onset of another world war… Spoiler alert: It didn’t work. Someone once said that history doesn’t always repeat itself, but that it often rhymes. Well, brace yourself for some poetry:By fall of 1938 Hitler had already managed to annex Austria into Germany, and was already trying to “stand up” for the Russian German speaking portions of Ukraine Czechoslovakia. The eventual conquest of Czechoslovakia was a part of Hitler’s grand plan to reestablish the “greatness of Germany”;...

Expanded intervention in Syria's civil war? The promised "red line" punitive strike? An equivocal pause for congressional rumination? Ambiguous postponement? Or... a "Saturday Night Live" Emily Litella "never mind" skit on the world stage -- farcical incompetence an obscene response to obscene tragedy? The five preceding sentence fragments framed as questions sketch five potential near-term futures, each either created by or now operationally constrained by President Barack Obama's Aug. 20, 2012 "red line" declaration. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they could all occur. Near-simultaneity would be difficult, but given this past week's combination of Keystone Kops and kabuki,...