This one’s for Marta

I went on to argue that maybe Churchill was successful against the Nazis precisely because he was simplistic. The same inability to deal with “nuances” and appreciate adversarial points of view, may have been the source of his implacable opposition to Nazi Germany. When Hitler occupied the Rhineland, many in Britain argued that Hitler was “a decent sort of chap” and not letting him send soldiers into the Rhineland was like “asking England not to send troops into Yorkshire”. The current liberal position that Osama bin Laden’s objections to US troops in Arabia somehow explain his behaviour, sound similar. In fact, throughout the ’30s, large sections of British “intellectuals” believed that Germany had been “wronged” and hence Adolf Hitler’s actions were justified. This is so similar to the current fashionable view that the “wrongs” done to Moslems in Palestine (and elsewhere?) justify Islamist terror.

Churchill did not agree then. Bush does not agree now. Churchill saw the occupation of Rhineland as a clear “defeat” for the allies. Many a British leader may have compromised with the Nazis (for example, when Hitler sent Herman Hesse to negotiate a deal). Simplistic Churchill would have none of it. And in a strange pattern of recurrence, it is the common people of Britain who were with Churchill on this, not the nuanced intellectual elite who could always appreciate the other chap’s point of view. Bush refused to look at Saddam Hussein as a “reasonable sort of chap”…and one can argue that he got Saddam before his Rhineland, before his creation of a Luftwaffe and a Wehrmacht. If Britain and France had attacked Germany at the time of the Rhineland occupation, the liberal media would have accused them of “misplaced pre-emption” and of moving before there was certainty that Hitler had “weapons of aggression”…and sure enough they would not have found ready Panzer divisions, therefore no weapons of aggression! I, for one, would argue that not finding WMD in Iraq is a measure of success of the doctrine of pre-emption, not its failure.

Bush has stronger empirical evidence in his favour. Not one of the 9/11 terrorists were impoverished Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, completely negating the argument that the so-called “wronged” were hitting back. Most were from affluent Saudi Arabia, a country which owes its affluence entirely to American capital, technology and risk-taking. This, of course, brings us to the criticism of Bush that is most difficult to refute. If Wahabi Saudi Arabia is the problem, why cozy up to them? Why pick on “secular” Iraq which had minimal Al-Qaeda connections? This is what I refer to as the undesirable but necessary Faustian bargain. Churchill allied with Josef Stalin to fight Hitler. Clearly a bargain with the devil! Stalin competed with Hitler in the dance of evil. And yet, looking back, the alliance with Stalin was both necessary and appropriate. Ronald Reagan had an alliance with bin Laden in order to get at the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. This time the devil’s pact was not that obvious, but clearly without it the Berlin Wall may still be standing. The fact of the matter is that Faustian bargains where you ally with what is perceived as the lesser evil at that time is a component of statecraft that we cannot run away from.

An alliance with Wahabi Saudi Arabia or a military-run Pakistan (which till yesterday, and possibly even today, is a sponsor of the Taliban) are not easy to countenance or accept, but they may be necessary temporary expedients. Will they come back like Frankensteins to bite and to sting? Possibly, even probably, and yet there is no alternative. Ay, there’s the rub. America and the rest of the world simply have to live with it and make the most of it…but always acting in a clear-eyed manner devoid of illusions.

Additionally, Bush has done something that was crucial in the psychological war with his opponents. Hitler had contempt for weak-kneed democracies unwilling to fight in the Rhineland or in Czechoslovakia. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had given the impression to much of the world that America was in a state of paralysis scared of casualties and body-bags. Bush has made the transition from Chamberlain to Churchill.

I did not completely convince Marta. One never does in such situations. But I did get her to look at her president from a different perspective. Churchill never went to Oxford or Cambridge and was considered a clumsy, flat-footed, unreasonable, single-minded sort of fellow. Bush has attended Yale and Harvard, but that is dismissed one way or another by his detractors. What is certain is that liberal intellectuals had contempt for Churchill and are derisive of Bush. The qualities needed to fight Nazism then or Islamist Fascism today may not only be the “simplistic world-view” (“you are with us or against us”) or the ability to deal with devil’s pacts, it might be a compulsory requirement that the leader in question be looked down upon by sophisticated, cosmopolitan, liberal intellectuals!