President Bush's recent speech to the Knesset has caused ructions back on the campaign trail in the US. Barack Obama seems to have decided that Bush's warnings against attempts to appease terrorists (sorry, "tearists" in Bush-speak) were aimed at him. Obama may be right to take umbrage, but I was struck (or rather, insulted) by another aspect of what Bush said. Here's the offending paragraph:
'Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.'
Quite so George. Thank goodness that the rest of America was more alive to the Nazi threat than that (Republican) senator. That must be why it took the United States more than 26 months after the Nazi invasion of Poland to get involved in the fighting. Who knows how many lives might have been saved, Jewish or French or Danish or Norwegian or British, if the US had committed itself earlier?
Anyway, if Obama is saying that the US should try to talk to its enemies, he's not wrong, is he? You don't have to negotiate with your friends. And wasn't it Winston Churchill, nobody's idea of an appeaser, who said "Better jaw-jaw than war-war"? You remember Churchill, don't you George? Bit of a boozer, liked his cigars. He's the one who was leading the fight against Nazi Germany while your compatriots were sitting on their hands.
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