Everything Old is New Again

Remember back before the Iraq war when those who thought it was a bad idea were called appeasers? Good times. And times that some on the right, like Tony Blankley in his latest article, are eager to repeat.

The last sentence calling for diplomacy is such a feeble, mantra-like invocation of a hopeless solution when preceded by his confident statements that he thinks they want the bomb and will get it. Virtually no one believes Iran only wants peaceful nuclear generation. Neither do serious people believe that enactable economic and diplomatic sanctions will deflect the Iranians from their objective

Thus, the offer on the table -- to give them peaceful nuclear technology or threaten them with non-military sanction -- suffers from providing a "carrot that is not tempting and a stick that is not threatening." (Ian Kershaw's "Making Friends with Hitler.")

This evolving mental path to appeasement mirrors in uncanny detail a similar path taken by the British government to Hitler in the 1930s.

Yeah, it turns out, on closer inspection that it is our dealing with Iran that resembles appeasement in the 30s, not Iraq. What a shocker.

Of course he admits that this argument is going to be harder this time around.

This defeatist attitude exists largely because with the Iraq war as bad precedent -- just as WWI was a bad precedent for another war in 1933 -- military action has been placed, as an emotional response to unpleasantness, out of the question by a weary Western elite.

Yeah, after terrorizing us about the enemy out of Iraq, which turned out to be, at best, a paper tiger, It is going to be harder to get everybody railed up about the danger out of Iran. But, who is to blame for that, Mr. Blankly?