As Betsy Newmark said of Michael Barone’s comparison of the Ned Lamont Democrats to Neville Chamberlain, “Ouch.” Barone looks at Chamberlain’s “Tuesday” and “Thursday” compared to those of Democrats last week when first Lamont won, then the world was reminded of the threat of terrorism when it learned of the thwarting of the UK terror plot.
The Iranian mullahs and the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad want to destroy Israel and inflict as much damage to the United States as they can. They say so over and over again. They hate our way of life, our freedoms and our tolerance. Unfortunately, there’s no obvious and easy way to handle the Iranian regime, just as there was no obvious and easy way to handle Hitler in the late 1930s.
At least Neville Chamberlain was made of sterner stuff. His Tuesday was the Munich agreement in September 1938, when he and the French persuaded Czechoslovakia to give up its borderlands to Hitler. He was cheered by vast crowds eager to avoid the horrors of war. His Thursday came in March 1939, when Nazi troops marched into Prague.
Chamberlain proceeded to build up Britain’s military forces and to embark on a vigorous diplomacy to cabin Hitler in. He realized instantly that he had been, as Winston Churchill was to say in his funeral oration in the House of Commons, “deceived by a wicked man.” He prepared to call Churchill, his bitter critic on Munich, into government. Chamberlain’s diplomacy ultimately failed: Hitler wanted war too much. But Chamberlain stayed true to his countrymen, yielding his place to Churchill and strenuously supporting him when Britain was in peril.
Can we expect as much of our Left? It seems doubtful. Our Left criticized George W. Bush when The New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency was surveilling telephone calls from al-Qaida suspects overseas to the United States. Now it appears that the United States surveilled the British terrorists, and that they made phone calls to the United States. The Left cried foul when The New York Times revealed that the United States was monitoring money transfers at the SWIFT bank clearinghouse in Brussels. Now it appears that there was monitoring of money transfers by the British terrorists in Pakistan. On Tuesday, the Left was gleeful that it was scoring political points against George W. Bush. On Thursday, it seemed that the supposedly controversial NSA surveillance contributed to savings thousands of lives.Betsy was right, “Ouch” just about says it all.
Different times indeed.
Speaking of Times, it is perhaps interesting to recall that the British Security Coordination (BSC) group was headquartered in Manhattan in 1940, hard by the NYT, and maintained its secrecy until 1962, when it revealed itself.
Reporting to FDR and Churchill and led by William Stephenson, BSC was the largest and best “CIA” type service in WWII, responsible in large part for the enigma captures, influencing Stalin to switch sides, and countless intelligence successes. No agency of any time and of any country can claim the intelligence successes of BSC, not KGB or even Mossad.
The stakes were high and the activity level intense. Without BSC the victory in WWII would have been doubtful.
Would the secrecy that allowed this huge agency to remain unknown for more than twenty years be possible today?
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Barone has become my favorite writer. He is just brilliant.