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Appeasement won't stop Saddam, any more than Hitler
(Filed: 02/09/2002)
Comment on recent American comparisons between Churchill and President George W Bush, and between Hitler and Saddam Hussein, has focused largely on personalities. Tomorrow, however, is the 63rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, and it is worth recalling that even that war - justifications for which now seem unassailable, an almost permanent answer to pacifism - was at the time a deeply divisive issue. Just as the prospect of invading Iraq provokes clerical and secular hand-wringing now, so did the prospect of taking up arms against Nazism then. It wasn't only a question of the famous Oxford Union debate in which undergraduates voted not to fight for king and country. In 1933, when Hitler assumed power, the British government earnestly endorsed the international Disarmament Conference in Geneva, while the electors of Fulham returned a Peace candidate to Parliament. In 1935, when Hitler reintroduced conscription in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Britain signed a naval agreement with Germany and a nationwide campaign, the UK Peace Ballot, achieved the return of no fewer than 11,640,066 forms. "Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm," the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, later lamented in Parliament. "Does anyone think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to the cry at that moment?" Hitler knew that democracies rarely make war unless out of necessity, so when he marched into the demilitarised Rhineland he rightly judged the reactions of Britain and France: they wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't do anything about it. Even when the British government was reluctantly persuaded to rearm, the Labour Party remained opposed. "We must flatly refuse to support [the government's] armament policy," wrote Herbert Morrison, more concerned that it might be used against the Left's hero, Stalin, than with doing anything about Hitler. When, following the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain reported to Parliament that Hitler had invited him to discussions in Munich, he was wildly cheered. On his return, with his famous proclamation of "peace with honour", he was a national hero, criticised by only a few well-known dissenters such as Churchill and Duff Cooper. Those now stigmatised as "appeasers" in fact represented the greater part of informed, conventional thinking. Their equivalents now are those in the media who think that George W Bush is stupid, and mock his inarticulacy. They would also have mocked Churchill. A strong democratic desire for peace might, paradoxically, make war more likely, since it is easily forgotten that the price of security is preparedness to forgo it. When Britain eventually gave its guarantee to Poland on March 31, 1939, Hitler had been tolerated for so long that by then only war could stop him. Democracies underestimate tyrants until it is too late to avoid fighting, by which time tyrants have learnt to underestimate democratic willingness to fight. Superficially, Hitler was a much bigger threat to us, much closer to home than Saddam Hussein. But since then, in war as in trade and communication, the world has got smaller. Given the means of delivery (overtly by missile or plane, or covertly by, say, building a nuclear device into a container ship), weapons of mass destruction are at least as great a threat in the hands of a distant hostile power now as was the much closer, conventional Luftwaffe in 1940. How would Tony Blair explain to the survivors of a devastated Southampton that, well, yes, actually, we did know that Saddam was planning something like this but it didn't at the time seem right to do anything about it? Both Hitler's and Saddam's regimes have flourished on unfinished business and myth. Hitler pretended that the First World War German army was unbeaten in the field (partly because it was permitted, against British objections, to march back with its arms) and propagated the potent myth that the (unpaid) reparations stipulated by Versailles made war inevitable. Saddam benefited from the premature halting of the Gulf War by George Bush Snr and the subsequent lack of Western support for his dissidents, as well as from the myth that UN sanctions, rather than his own actions, are harming his people and their children. Germany from the early 1920s and Iraq from the early 1990s did all they could to rearm and make secret preparations to continue the fight. Both ever more aggressively breached the restrictions the international community imposed on them, whether by secretly building submarines or playing games with UN weapons inspectors. Both could have been stopped earlier by more resolute action, the one by Britain and France, the other by Bill Clinton. Both Saddam and Hitler demonstrated a fondness for chemical weapons and saw Jews as part of the problem. Yet many people do not view Saddam as a direct threat to us, nor really to anyone beyond his own borders. The next Archbishop of Canterbury and a number of other bishops see "no evidence that a pre-emptive strike in Iraq would satisfy the criteria for a just war". The Roman Catholic Pax Christi goes further: "There can be no justification for war by another state unless and until the Iraqi government itself launches an attack." In fact, modern Christian criteria for a just war - that there should be lawful authority, just cause, every effort of resolution by other means, no worse evils created than those attacked and a reasonable chance of success - make it unlikely that even Britain's September 3, 1939 declaration would have been justified by today's clerics. Making a successful political case for an attack on Iraq requires, firstly, that the case be made, which it has not been yet, explicitly and in detail; and, secondly, that it include at least one killer fact. Saddam has to be shown either to have done something or to be intending something awful. In her book War Against America, the American journalist and academic Laurie Mylroie makes a persuasive case for Iraqi involvement in the September 11 outrages, with Saddam as senior partner. That, if true, ought to be sufficient. Imagine how we would feel if thousands had died in Canary Wharf and Whitehall. But the killer fact is still missing. If it exists and were quotable, it would do much to lessen Middle Eastern antipathy to action against Iraq (they understand revenge), and it would make Mr Blair's life easier. As it is, though, the mixed signals from Washington and Whitehall make it impossible to guess whether such a fact exists. A conspiracy theorist might interpret it all as contrived confusion, designed to worry and baffle Saddam into allowing weapons inspectors back. Sadly, that's unlikely; genuine confusion, not conspiracy, is nearly always the case. Tomorrow, however, we might try to view current concerns through the eyes of those who, 63 years ago, witnessed the first sparks of an almost unimaginable conflagration. Many of them had doubts, too, even after the sinking, on day one, without warning, by a German U-boat of the British liner Athena, with the loss of 112 men, women and children. Most of that generation is already dead; most of the rest will be within five years. Those of us who grew up in the shadow of their war and benefited so much from their willingness to fight should listen to them and treasure their memories. It may be that their experience could help us decide when to confront evil, and how, though it won't make it easy. It is rarely that.
- The Second World War Experience Centre, Leeds, exists to collect and record personal experiences of anyone, military or civilian, involved in the Second World War. Tel 0113 2584993, e-mail enquiries@war-experience.org
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