Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation and blogging away, reminding me both of how regularly I disagree with him, and of how much I still find reading him valuable.
He is an able rhetorical tactician, and sometimes you have to stop reading and step back to decode those tactics. For some time now, Sullivan has referred to those who do not share his exact hard-line, pro-Bush stances as “the forces of appeasement” or “the appeasement brigade.” In applying this label he is, of course, associating his opponents with Neville Chamberlain and the other European leaders who, in the dark days of the 1930s, chose either not to oppose Hitler’s aggressive moves against Germany’s neighbors, or to oppose them with insufficient spine.
This invocation of the Nazi analogy skirts perilously close to Godwin’s Law, but it’s worth examining. An “appeasement” policy depends on the notion of propitiation: There’s a threat, but you believe, somehow, that you can give your enemy what he wants and avert the threat — you can stop Hitler from going after you by giving him Czechoslovakia.
But there is no Czechoslovakia today. If there were any true advocates of appeasement right now, you could identify them by their willingness to give in to some demand of our enemies. (The “war brigade” does not like to be pressed too hard to define exactly who our enemies are, which makes this a little problematic, but for the sake of argument let’s name al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, whom we can widely agree on.) Well, what are those demands? There are none. Which makes the whole “appeasement” argument a big red herring.
Now, if you really wanted to get interesting here, you could say that, while al-Qaida has no explicit demands, it does have some goals: It would like to see the West’s freedoms curtailed, our open society hobbled, American democracy undermined and replaced by theocracy.
But, no, you won’t find me calling John Ashcroft an “appeaser”!
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