Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Preventive War and Winston Churchill
On March 5th, 1946, the Allies having secured victory in WWII, Winston Churchill delivered an exceptionally prescient speech he entitled "Sinews of Peace." Read it all. This presentation at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri came ultimately to be known as the "Iron Curtain Speech," in which he observed that Marshal Stalin, his and FDR's ally in the War against Hitler's Fascism, was bringing a reign of tyranny down upon the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. There are so many foundations of current American and British foreign policy in Churchill's speech, it is worth reading again.
Also within the body of that brilliant exposition, was the following reflection and observation, which I think is apt to the management of US Middle Eastern Policy and our current War on Terror:
Our culture, based on freedom and individual liberty, is transactional in nature, built on trust, designed to reach reasonable, transparent and fairminded agreement. Tyrannies are designed to impose will, are inherently deceptive and fraudulent, and rely purely on power relationships. Churchill fully understood that free societies must project military strength, not legalistic weakness, to halt the forward march of tyranny of any stripe. Tyrants -- Saddam, Kim, Qaddafi, Assad, the Iranian Mullahs -- they must respect American power and the will to defend and deliver freedom above all else. And so must Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Can there be any doubt that Churchill would have fully concurred with our current action in Iraq and the Middle East? He likely would have been disappointed by our failure to oust Saddam in 1991, but certainly he would have supported Saddam's ouster by now. The lessons of German aggression in 1933 (troop movements) and again in 1935 (annexation of Czechoslavakia) to Churchill were obvious. Stop him early. Since it didn't happen, millions upon millions perished.
Also within the body of that brilliant exposition, was the following reflection and observation, which I think is apt to the management of US Middle Eastern Policy and our current War on Terror:
From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, their influence for furthering those principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them. If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.
Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again. This can only be achieved by reaching now, in 1946, a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organisation and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the world instrument, supported by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connections. There is the solution which I respectfully offer to you in this Address to which I have given the title "The Sinews of Peace."
Our culture, based on freedom and individual liberty, is transactional in nature, built on trust, designed to reach reasonable, transparent and fairminded agreement. Tyrannies are designed to impose will, are inherently deceptive and fraudulent, and rely purely on power relationships. Churchill fully understood that free societies must project military strength, not legalistic weakness, to halt the forward march of tyranny of any stripe. Tyrants -- Saddam, Kim, Qaddafi, Assad, the Iranian Mullahs -- they must respect American power and the will to defend and deliver freedom above all else. And so must Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Can there be any doubt that Churchill would have fully concurred with our current action in Iraq and the Middle East? He likely would have been disappointed by our failure to oust Saddam in 1991, but certainly he would have supported Saddam's ouster by now. The lessons of German aggression in 1933 (troop movements) and again in 1935 (annexation of Czechoslavakia) to Churchill were obvious. Stop him early. Since it didn't happen, millions upon millions perished.
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