Kevin Drum bases his challenge I discuss below on some basic history:
The basic post-9/11 position among conservatives is that the war on terror is the moral equivalent of the anti-fascist crusade of World War II and the anticommunist crusade of the Cold War. Since this is their core argument, let’s take a look at the historical comparisons.
First, World War II. Here’s a quickie timeline of what happened in the five years before the United States entered the war: In 1936 German troops occupied the Rhineland. In 1938 Austria fell in the Anschluss, Hitler bullied Neville Chamberlain into brokering the Munich agreement that turned over Czechoslovakia to Germany, and the Nazi holocaust against the Jews began in earnest with Kristallnacht. In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, and a year later overran Scandinavia, Belgium, and France and began the Battle of Britain. In 1941 Rommel began operations in North Africa and in June Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union.
…
What’s the point of these historical highlights? Just this: in the five years before 1941, world events made the danger from fascism so clear that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor even diehard Republican isolationists didn’t hesitate to declare war. The argument was over.
It’s not quite so simple, Kevin. The period leading up to World War II was not nearly one of such clear political unity and commonality of vision.
Churchill also kept himself from falling prey to the trend toward unnuanced pacifism in the twenties and thirties. In 1929, sixty-two countries, including the United States, signed the Kellog-Briand Pact, an instrument renouncing war as a means of international power. Over three different years – 1935, 1936, and 1937 – the United States passed Neutrality Acts that prevented the United States from engaging in conflicts overseas and from selling arms to belligerents. Those in the West who urged taking up arms against expansionist dictatorships like Germany (Hitler spoke of increasing Germany’s “living space” and announced a rearmament plan in 1935) or Italy (Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in the same year) or Japan (which had invaded China in 1931) were seen as dangerous warmongers. The climate in the United States and Britain between Versailles and the German invasion of Poland was passionately antiwar. “Mr. Chamberlain can’t seem to understand that we live in a very wicked world,” Churchill said as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government tried time and time again to find a way to manage Germany without resorting to arms.
– Franklin and Winston, by Jon Meacham, p 36
[On Dec 7, 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor] Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, then en route to the Soviet Union, reached Churchill that night. “He was naturally in a high state of excitement,” Eden recalled. He found Churchill was already full of plans to go to Washington. Eden, however, “was not sure that the Americans would want him so soon.”
Eden was right. When Roosevelt dictated his speech to Grace Tully, it concerned on nation – Japan. He did not mention Germany. Eden seemed to understand this distinction; Churchill did not. “The United States and Britain were now allies,” Eden said, “in the war against Japan.”
Against Japan – not yet against Germany. Typically, Churchill had suppressed nuance in his delight over the events of the day. Thus began a fraught week as Roosevelt put off Churchill’s excited talk of a quick trip to Washington.
Would Hitler take America on?
– pp 132-133
The reality is that even given Roosevelt’s clear perception that fighting Germany was part of the larger battle, we did not declare war on Hitler’s Germany – Hitler declared war on us in a typical fit of overreaching. Had he not done so, the history of the next year or two would have been far more complex, politically, for Roosevelt and Churchill.
…to be continued…
So, I guess the analogy to modern times might be…
That EUROPE is going to keep dragging their feet until something really awful (far worse than a few bombs in a train station) happens in their midst. And even then, they will be reluctant at first to join our efforts to crush a ruthless enemy.
DRK
… in the five years before 1941, world events made the danger from fascism so clear that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor even diehard Republican isolationists didn’t hesitate to declare war. The argument was over.
It takes a really obstinant quasi-pacifist to appreciate this argument.
We declared formal war on Japan because they had (a) already formally declared war on us and (b) bombed Pearl Harbor. Not because of anything that happened during the previous five years. Even then, we did not declare war on Hitler. He declared war on us, three days later.
That’s what it took to get us into the war – not any argument. There was no argument or evidence that made any impression on isolationists like Wheeler, or Anglophobes like Kennedy, or on the pacifists who claimed – right up to the minute that the Arizona was hit – that the war was a conspiracy to benefit munitions manufacturers (“The Merchants of Death”, as they called them).
At least the communists were on board before Pearl Harbor, as they had gone overnight from being “pacifists” to blood-thirsty warmongers the previous June, when Hitler broke the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded Russia. Prior to that, of course, they were willing to ignore what their Nazi allies were doing to Jews in Europe.
Is Kevin Drum’s point that he is no more pig-headed than these people were? Okay, then. But when a nuclear bomb goes off in New York harbor, it’s going to be a little late for everybody to get religion.
To add a bit of spice to the narrative, Deedes, who covered the war in Ethiopia, recently remarked in his journal in the Telegraph that there were rumours that the Bank of France financed Mussolini’s Abysinnian adventure. Some things never change.
1. It is not about time lines it is about ideology.
2. It is not just ideology. It is ideology in action.
3. It is not just about ideology in action. It is about 9/11.
If you take 9/11 and work back to #2. and them #1. it all becomes clear.
The core problem for the left and the world is: was 9/11 an act of war?
All I can say is that I said to my first mate when I saw the second plane heading for the second tower. “This means war”. It was instinctive.
I suppose that is what our lefty friend doesn’t like. The whole thing is driven by events and not properly voted out of comittee.
“All I can say is that I said to my first mate when I saw the second plane heading for the second tower. “This means war”. It was instinctive.”
I think that’s the point.
I had a similar reaction. And when terrorists and terrorist apologists are in the country (which to some extent is always the case if only because of the imam of a certain local mosque), I feel “our” space is being violated. It’s not intellectual, it’s an internal chemical reaction, like ants responding to an alien ant in the hive. “Fight! You, out!” On the other hand, when George W. Bush visited here, that didn’t feel to me like a violation of our space at all. “Pass, friend. Welcome, guest.”
On the other hand, a moderate progressive’s friend’s reactions were the opposite. Terror advocates are here? OK, we’d best keep a sharp lookout for anti-Muslim prejudice then. George W. Bush is here – with his armed American bodyguards? – at our Parliament house, a symbol of our nation!?? Gut reaction: strange-ant-in-the-hive hostility to the armed invasion of our space. Suddenly all the sophistication and poised neutrality switched off. The reality was just intense friend-or-foe fury.
Who triggers your reactions like that says a lot about you. And whether something like 11 September, 2001 is a lamentable incident, or war, or something more terrible than a “normal” limited war, some condition of absolute war-to-the-knife, is connected with that. And this also says a lot about who you really are.
I think talking in terms of abstractions like “security concerns” beclouds the intense, chemical, dichotomous reactions that are at the heart of war, and that are driving forward the colossal event we are in.
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“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005251.php
bq. If he thinks too many liberals are squishy on terrorism, he needs to persuade us not just that Islamic totalitarianism is bad — of course it’s bad — but that it’s also an overwhelming danger to the security of the United States. After all:
bq. * Subsequent to 9/11, virtually no Americans have died from terrorist acts. Rather, American deaths have been caused by our own war of choice in Iraq — a country that has turned out to possess no WMD and have virtually no serious connection to al-Qaeda.
bq. * For all his tough talk, the president of the United States has tacitly admitted that he doesn’t feel this war is important enough to require any sacrifice on the part of the American citizenry.
bq. * The Republican party has made it as clear as it possibly can that the war on terror is not vital enough to require either bipartisan support or the support of the rest of the world. They’ve treated it more like a garden variety electoral wedge issue than a world historical struggle.
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This is all based on a guy whose friend or foe detector is detecting: domestic political rivals! It doesn’t agree with – it falsifies – it can’t even recognise – the basic friend-or-foe reaction that, for example, M. Simon and I would share on this, despite other (and very deep) differences.
I absolutely don’t think it is possible to sustain a civilisation, a community, or much of anything without this raw friend-or-foe reaction that people won’t be reasoned out of. If you have to have a debate about, for example, whether or why people like the Beslan “martyrs” have to be killed (and if need be pursued and killed) if they come to a school near you – forget it, leave, because there is already no community. Only a practical determination to *kill* the threat to _our_ children suffices. (Though whether it is best, as a plan or by some calculation of chances, to do that by going for the invaders directly or by letting professionals do their jobs is another issue.)
Biologically – a mother, a father that can be talked into letting child-stealing cannibals set up house peaceably next door are not much good. That is at the root of it.
Eliminate that feeling, and the will to act on it in a radical situation: eliminate the group. No third option is on offer, not for our species.
I can’t overstate how vital, how fundamental I think that is. It’s a lot more radical than any intellectually interesting theory you can dream up. Pardon my anti-intellectual ranting here.
I do not for an instant believe that sophisticated folk are operating by fundamentally different rules. They just have different lists – and often (I am not saying with Kevin Drum, who said what he means) a disturbing lack of forthrightness as to what might be on them.
I don’t understand what lessons Drum learned from WWII. Drum is arguing that it took five years and an invasion for head-in-the-mud Republicans to realize that war was inevitable. What is the point, here? Warhawks need to be patient with their isolationist brethren? We need to wait for an invasion? Five years is a reasonable time to wait?
“Conservatives” (like Kenneth Pollack) point to WWII and say we should have acted sooner. The wait was too deadly. Roosevelt was right to begin looking for ways to confront NAZI Germany in 1938. The Republican isolationists were wrong to hinder his efforts.
Are the 2004 Democrats the heirs of the 1930s Republican Party? Are they essentially isolationist? Do they instinctively feel so much guilt about the past that they recoil from present threats? Do they view military action as a self-enriching ploy of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex (much as the Nye Commission did previously)? Whither the future with such a limitted view of the past?
Patrick
While we’re busily re-interpreting the history of World War II, it bears mentioning that while the attack on Pearl Harbor brought Republican isolationists to support war (sort of), the Left began to support war when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Up until then they had been making pretty much the same noises as they are now.
Patrick, I appreciate your putting “conservative” in quotation marks regarding Kenneth Pollack.
He spent an hour on the Dennis Prager radio program today, promoting his book ‘The Persian Puzzle’ on Iran and America.
He said that he’s a Democrat, voted for Kerrey, and would prefer the foreign policy of Senators Biden and Hagel.
“Conservative” is as “conservative” does, I guess.
Kerry, sorry. (Oops.)
“* For all his tough talk, the president of the United States has tacitly admitted that he doesn’t feel this war is important enough to require any sacrifice on the part of the American citizenry.”
No, he hasn’t. He’s “tacitly admitted” that he doesn’t feel that “sacrifice on the part of the American citizenry” would really be necessary or helpful to win.
I mean, what is he looking for here? What does he mean by “sacrifice” and what’s the point of it? Does he want a draft? If so, I hardly see how doing something so counterproductive is the best way to show that he feels the war is important. Does he want a tax hike? Why should the taxpayers be the ones to sacrifice and not those on the receiving end of tax monies?
It’s pretty outrageous to advocate the use of punitive sanctions on our own people as a PR move. If sacrifice actually assists the war effort in some way, that’s one thing. If it’s just to show that you feel the war is important, there’s much better ways to do that.
Speaking of Bob Kerrey, he complained that “They declared war on us but we never declared war on them.”
WWII started long before Pearl Harbor. So did this war.
Patrick