Appeasement

There’s an old saying that’s seemingly been around forever, “If you can’t learn the lessons of history, then you’re cursed to relive them.” It’s pretty much the same thing as when your Dad told you that he was trying to save you from making the same mistakes he made. Unfortunately for most of us, we hear, but we don’t listen, and we suffer the consequences as a result. There are reasons to study history… to understand the mistakes made in the past, and use that knowledge to avoid making those same mistakes now. But I guess its human nature to learn the hard way, and it appears we’re on the verge of doing it again.

Sixty years ago appeasement cost millions of Jews their lives, as England and France negotiated and hesitated far too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to meaningless agreements. Appeasement legitimized Communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe, where for decades, suppressive and quite murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities. Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and even though they had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, Europeans debated and debated and were still debating when the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do their work for them, and not incidentally saving tens of thousands of Muslim lives.

Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European Appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," now ignores suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Appeasement allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam's torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush... Even as it is discovered that the loudest critics of the American war in Iraq made tens of billions of illicit dollars in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program.And now we are faced with other forms of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic Fundamentalists in Europe? By suggesting that they really should have a "Muslim Holiday" in Germany! A substantial fraction of the German Government, and if the polls are correct the German people, actually believe that creating an Official State "Muslim Holiday" will spare them from the wrath of fanatical Muslims. I recall the pictures of Neville Chamberlain waving the White Paper signed by Adolph Hitler and declaring "Peace in our time".

What else has to happen before the western public and its political leadership catch on? There is a sort of crusade underway, a crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against Western societies, and fully intent upon Western Civilization's utter destruction. It’s a conflict that will probably continue longer than any war of the last century - a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be “appeased” by the liberals much touted compromise, nor tamed by tolerance and accommodation, but is actually spurred on by such gestures, which have proven to be, and will always be taken by the Islamists for a sign of weakness.

For his policies, President Bush risks the fall of the dollar, additional national debt, a massive burden on the American economy, and political suicide… because unlike almost all of Europe, he realizes what is at stake - literally everything. While Europeans criticize the "capitalistic robber barons" of America because they seem too sure of their priorities, they timidly defend their Social Welfare systems. “Stay out of it!” they wail, “It could get expensive!” In this country we'd rather discuss reducing our workweek, the costs of health care, or the price of gasoline. Or listen to the anti-was crowd preach about the need to "reach out to terrorists… understand and forgive". Today, we find America’s liberals preaching much the same thing as their European brethren, all conveniently forgetting that if you once pay the Danegeld you still have the Danes to contend with, and they will be back next year, with even greater demands.

The somewhat misnamed “War on Terror” is not being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those are merely individual battles in a world wide war that pits the western concept of a free and open civilization against a fifteen hundred year old dictatorial religion founded in the deserts of the mid-east by a warlike nomadic society, and based on total subjugation to the will of a few “rulers”. The first crusade of 1095 AD was ostensibly fought to free the holy land from non-Christians, or at least that was the general excuse. It was also fought to halt Muslim excursions (read “invasions”) into western Christian lands, most notably the vestiges of the Eastern Holy Roman Empire in Constantinople. That crusade was marginally successful only because the Arabic Muslims were disorganized both politically and militarily. They also had no real idea of how to fight the heavily armored knights of Europe. Over the following centuries the Arabs became better organized, and adopted the highly mobile light cavalry tactics of the eastern steppe nomads, to which the western knights in their turn could not adapt. The following crusades became an ongoing war of attrition which the west was ill suited to sustain, and subsequently Europe lost its tenuous hold on the Holy Land.

Since those long ago days, the Arabic style of war changed little until the twentieth century and the massive influx of western “petro-dollars”. With that money they could buy the modern toys of the more developed nations. Today we see Arab national armies equipped with modern western weapons, which for the most part they little understand and are generally ill suited to use against our western armies. However, the Arabic fundamentalists understand this problem, and unlike the west are adapting to the changing times. They are not fighting us tank for tank, or jet fighter for jet fighter. Instead they utilize a form of guerrilla warfare, terror, pitting the snipers bullet, IED, and suicide bomber against civilians. Guerrilla warfare is something that western leaders have been notoriously slow to understand, and against which our conventional military wisdom has had little success over the last fifty years.

Fortunately for the west, the Arabs are again politically disorganized, and divided along religious lines. But we, in our arrogance, mistakenly assume that Islamic fundamentalists think in the same manner we do, that they have similar values, and that they can be swayed by our logic. We thought much the same about Hitler, and about the Communists. We failed to heed the warnings of Mien Kampf, and got WW II as the result. We ignored the Communist Manifesto, and got the Cold War. Today we fail to heed the warnings of the Quran, and hope to “appease” fundamentalist Islam.

It would seem that far too many of our national leaders refuse to learn from history, and once again are sentencing us to relive it.