MER - 'Embalm, cremate, bury at sea'

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> 'Embalm, cremate, bury at sea'<br><br>Arnold Beichman<br>Hoover Institution<br><br>Published 9/3/2002<br><br><br><br> The story is told about Winston Churchill, a backbencher in the House of Commons around Munich-time in 1938. During a<br>debate about defense, Churchill was demanding increased appropriations for air defense, arguing that the Chamberlain<br>government hadn't appropriated enough to meet the threat of an expanding Luftwaffe. An irate MP shouted out, "How much is<br>enough?" The future prime minister said the questioner reminded him of the man who received a cable from Brazil informing him<br>of death of his mother-in-law and requesting instructions. "Embalm, cremate, bury at sea," the man wired back, "take no<br>chances."<br> It turned out that Churchill's advice was quite timely (however unfriendly it was to mothers-in-law) even though it was<br>ignored until late in the day. The 1930s was a decade of pacifism and willful blindness to political reality. It was the era of<br>appeasement, the belief that you could tame the shark by feeding him enough so that his teeth would wear out. Oxford students<br>were vowing, "I will not fight for king or country." The British Labor Party at its annual convention in 1933 — with Hitler<br>already in power — voted overwhelmingly for total abolition of the Royal Air Force. Fortunately, the Labor Party was then in<br>opposition as it continued to be in 1938 when it voted against conscription while Hitler was taking over the Sudetenland. What<br>Hitler did had been foretold by Hitler himself in his book, "Mein Kampf" and in countless speeches. It was in the post-World<br>War II years that one heard the rueful pronouncement: "Stalin lied and everybody believed him; Hitler told the truth and nobody<br>believed him."<br> In January 1935, Hitler nullified the arms limitations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Peace Treaty. No reaction. In<br>March 1936, Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties. No<br>reaction. In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria in violation of the Versailles Treaty and his many promises. No reaction. And<br>then, in March 1939, Hitler marched into Prague and that was the end of democratic Czechoslovakia. Still no reaction The<br>shark was still hungry. Then came Poland and the unnecessary war. <br> In "The Gathering Storm," the first of Churchill's six-volume history of the Second World War, he describes in the preface a<br>conversation with President Roosevelt who wondered aloud what to call the war. "I said at once," writes Churchill, 'The<br>Unnecessary War' . . . There never was a war more easy to stop than that which had just wrecked what was left of the world<br>from the previous struggle [World War I]."<br> Churchill's theme as expounded in that volume's preface reads: "How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom,<br>carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm." Today, Churchill might write how the European peoples through<br>their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature — and greed — allowed the wicked Saddam Hussein to rearm and, as Hitler<br>did, violate the Gulf War treaties.<br> The Oxford entrance exam on general history once contained this essay question: "The chief practical use of history is to<br>deliver us from plausible analogies." Yet it is tempting to recall that yesterday's pacifist British Labor Party in its 21st-century<br>incarnation is today pressing Prime Minister Blair to continue what is — dare I say? — an appeasement policy toward Iraq.<br>Supporting that policy is Iraq's victim a decade ago, Kuwait, and Turkey and other Arab states who just yesterday were<br>American allies, under a U.N. banner, in the Gulf War. <br> Yet we have the final report of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1999, which states that Iraq sought to acquire<br>weapons of mass destruction, and finally frustrated UNSCOM's disarmament mission. We have Saddam's past record, how in<br>his retreat from Kuwait he set the oil wells ablaze, his gassing of the Kurds, his eight-year war with Iran, his cruel dictatorship,<br>his expulsion of U.N. inspectors, his willingness to sacrifice the health and nutrition of Iraqi children — and for what? <br> We may one day look back at the World Trade Center memorial and then stare at the horrors of a Saddam-ordered<br>biochemical attack on some American city and ponder the meaning of the words of George Santayana: "Those who cannot<br>remember the past are condemned to repeat it."<br><br> </body>