Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Obama's Appeasement Strategy

Caroline Glick notes that if it looks like appeasement, sounds like appeasement, works like appeasement then don't be shocked by the fact that it is appeasement.
As the president put it, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
The analogy is incredibly apt.

From a senator's point of view, it may seem like talking is the right thing to do, talking to Hamas, talking to Hezbollah, talking to Al-Queda, talking to Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, etc. A Senator thinks that because that is what Senators do--they talk.

But in the real world and in history, talking is sometimes good and oftentimes the worst thing. Appeasement has never worked. Ask Neville Chamberlain, ask the French prior to World War II. Oh, wait you can't--they are dead.

Obama, for such an educated man, has lost all sight of history.

You cannot negotiate, or discuss or come up with "some ingenious argument [that] will persuade them" when the default and only policy position for terrorist is "America must die!" They have no other demands, they have no other agenda, they have no other goal. Negotiation works when both sides have something to gain and something to lose. Terrorists have nothing to lose as they put no value on human life, including the lives of their own followers.

A duck is a duck, appeasement is appeasement. You can dress them both up in fancy language, but in the end, it is still a duck and it is still appeasement.

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