(A severely truncated version of this rant appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sept. 2, 2004)
Frustrated that the American public lacks the intelligence to see how swimmingly things are really going in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald, “You wouldn’t believe the photos I’ve got on George and Dick,” Rumsfeld has decided to play the “Munich” card. Speaking to the American Legion last week, Rumsfeld compared critics of the Iraq war to those who tried to appease Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. These naysayers on Iraq, he tut-tutted, “seem not to have learned the lessons of history.” The particular “lesson” that Rumsfeld apparently has in mind is that the weak-kneed British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his equally pusillanimous pal, Premier Eduoard Daladier of France, erred grievously at the September 1938 Munich Conference by caving in to Hitler’s threats to use force if necessary to reclaim the Sudetenland, an area whose large German-speaking population had been excised from Germany after World War I and grafted onto the new nation of Czechoslovakia. Critics of “appeasement” at Munich point out that despite his pledge to abandon his expansionist ambitions after acquiring the Sudetenland, Hitler went right ahead and seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia before proceeding merrily on his aggressive way until, less than a year later, his invasion of Poland plunged Europe into a war that could have been avoided if only Chamberlain and Daladier had shown some backbone at Munich.
In reality, believing that what the representatives of Great Britain and France did at Munich could have fundamentally altered Hitler’s course presumes that if Chamberlain and Daladier had just said “Buzz Off, You fascist creep!!,” Herr Hitler would simply have contented himself with staying put and playing with his little storm-trooper action figures. Had Hitler reacted less philosophically, however, there is little basis for believing that, at the time, Britain and France could have done much to stop him from canceling several thousand Czechs enroute to acquiring the Sudetenland. Even if they had tried, there is likewise no reason to assume that their response would have been sufficient to discourage him from future aggression. Certainly, Franklin Roosevelt gave no indication that the United States was either ready or willing at that point to provide meaningful assistance in any effort to resist Hitler militarily.
Those who have really “learned the lessons of history” will see that Rumsfeld’s simplistic analogy is based more on the Bush administration’s tortuous insistence on characterizing Islamic extremism as “a new kind of fascism” than on any real historical comparability between Europe in 1938 and the Middle East in 2006. They will also recognize in it the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”) fallacy that confuses historical sequencing with historical causation.
This kind of reasoning is not simply dumb, it is also dangerous. From Vietnam to Nicaragua, the “Munich Syndrome” as some call it, has been invoked again and again to justify questionable military interventions. Just last year, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day, President Bush sought to validate his own preference for military over diplomatic options by placing FDR’s February 1945 negotiations with Stalin at Yalta on the postwar status of Eastern Europe in the “unjust tradition of Munich.”
Given what we have seen of him in our own time, it should not surprise us to hear Bush intimate that, had he been president in 1945, he would not have hesitated to drag an already exhausted military and a war-weary American public into another bloody and doubtless protracted conflict. The Soviets, after all, had just turned the tide of war in Europe by sacrificing millions of lives to repulse Hitler, the latest in several centuries’ worth of brutal invaders from the West, and were not about to accept even the prospect of hostile nations on their western border without a fight.
Whenever a politician, or even a history professor for that matter, presumes to use “the lessons of the past” to influence our perceptions of the present, we should realize that the past offers a multitude of lessons, a great many of them contradictory and very few of them universal or straightforward enough for direct application to the here and now. If we truly hope to benefit from what the past can teach us, we must take care not only to know what happened and when but to understand why and how as well. If we don’t, we are likely to discover that, where history is concerned, a little learning can be almost as dangerous as none at all.
