Brendan Loy puts it exactly the way I would:
President Bush’s comment, by contrast, is not within the realm of rationality. He is claiming that the mere act of sitting down and negotiating with an enemy is tantamount to “appeasement.” That is absolutely absurd. Bush needs to look up a dictionary definition of the damn word he’s talking about. American Heritage defines “appeasement” as “the policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.” Concessions. Not negotiations. In no version of reality is the mere act of negotiating “appeasement.”
Now, it’s perfectly fair to debate whether Obama’s stated willingness to meet with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions is a good idea. I’m not at all sure it is, and my uncertainty on that point is one reason (among many) that I’m undecided between Obama and McCain. The mere act of engaging in negotiations does have certain potential negative consequences, particularly when you’re the world’s unipolar power — it tends to bestow a certain veneer of legitimacy to the other side, it can be a propaganda coup, etc. These factors need to be considered, and weighed against the potential positive consequences. That is an important debate to have.
But regardless of where you come down in that debate, calling the simple act of negotiating “appeasement” is clearly incorrect. It’s not “appeasement” unless you concede something. Period.
Exactly.
Neville Chamberlain’s grave mistake wasn’t the fact that he went to Munich and met with Hitler. It was the fact that he acceded to Hilter’s territorial ambitions in Czechoslovakia. If he’d told the Bavarian Beer Hall Putchist to go to hell, or whatever the proper diplomatic language might have been at the time, then the mere fact that he’d met with Hitler would be, at most, an historical footnote. At the time, Chamberlain believed, incorrectly as it turns out, that the Germans were far stronger than they actually were. As a result, he went to Munich with bad intelligence (sound familiar George ?) and made an historically inexcusable deal.
Kennedy met with Krushchev and, two years later, through diplomacy, saved the world from a nuclear war.
Nixon went to China and scored a diplomatic coup that created a permanent wedge in worldwide Communism.
Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev and the Cold War came to an end without a single mushroom cloud.
Unless you’re an 11th Century Viking to whom war is the only end, or a Klingon, diplomacy is always the first option and military action the last.
President Bush, John McCain, and the right-wing talk radio scream-fest would do well to remember that.
And if you want to talk about appeasers, let’s talk about how George H.W. Bush looked the other way while China massacred thousands of its own citizens who wanted nothing more than their own freedom.
