1. Anonymous says:

    Wow emptywheel, thanks for this.
    I hope Hegel is the read deal, we desperately need a majority of the Senate to get behind him. He’s attacking Rummy and DeadEye right where they need to be attacked, on their warped intepretation of Chamberlain’s appeasement policies.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Well, there won’t be a majority in the Senate (too few courageous Republicans). But he may prevent Bolton from coming to the Senate floor (a 9-9 tie remains in Committee). I get the feeling he may be trading a Bolton vote for some other concessions out of the Administration, but we shall see.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Yeah, though I’ve got more hope for a Hagel spine than a Chafee spine.

    It’s always possible that Lugar will stall on the vote–again, he was mentioned along with Hagel in the Neocon attack.

  4. Anonymous says:

    An alternate interpretation to Chamberlain’s behavior vis a vis Munich is that Britian was Not ready in 1937 or 1938 to take on Hilter. They had been caught flat footed during the 30’s and repulsion to war in England ran very high after WWI.

    The English did Not have operational radar til 39. The radar saved England during the air Battle of Britian.

    The British leadership, includung Chamberlain AND Churchill, knew they desperately needed to stall Germany til the radar came online.

    Chamberlain’s pact in Munich gave Britian that critical year til 39 to finish the super secret radar project, which the Germans did not have themselves.

    Hilter was planning to invade Poland in 1937 but was stalled one year by the pact with Chamberlain.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Hegel says â€Today, there is no such threat to world order.†referring to the rise of Nazi militirism in Germany.

    In all seriousness, the one threat to world order today is, in fact, the Bush administration.

  6. Anonymous says:

    For a long time I’ve watched Hegel move mostly in the shadow of
    McCain. Since McCain has proven to be less than meritorious of
    character (May 2004), Hegel has grown into his own. Like
    Feingold, they appear to operate independent of external pressure when it comes to their core beliefs. I say this without any insider knowledge, just what I have observed. Sufficed to say,
    I once admired McCain and Kerry for the same reasons.

  7. Anonymous says:

    On Munich, Keegan’s definitive history puts it as a ’win’ for Britain because it gave them an extra year to prepare. Hitler did, too, as Ian Kershaw’s biography abundantly demonstrates. Hitler considered the Munich agreement to be a defeat for him, and it was one reason why he pushed for an early invasion of Poland, against the advice of his general staff.

    Munich is complicated. People who are using it as a metaphor should use the Rhineland invasion as their example; it’s better and more to the point.

  8. Anonymous says:

    People, it’s Chuck HAGEL, not Hegel, who was a German philospher and the originator of speculation (the Hegelian dialectic). Hagel’s tasks are far more modest: talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. And for all of Bolton’s faults, to call out probably the MOST incompetent of ALL of Boosh’s many appointments is no sin. Why is that woman still embarrassing this country? Well, could be that her boss sets the gold standard, and her behaviour as NatSecAdvisor and SecState pales in comparison.

  9. Anonymous says:

    I live in Nebraska. Senator Hagel has a history of sounding really good on the Sunday talk shows and elsewhere. However, his voting record doesn’t match what he says away from the senate floor and his voting record on the senate floor. He votes with the president 95/96% of the time. Don’t hold your breath that he will actually vote against Bolton.

  10. Anonymous says:

    McCain and Hagel were part of the group of 14 who refused to help their own party(s) in the cloture dispute in the US Senate last year; resulting in more ultraconservative judges. I am still reading the Bolton transcript from this week; some Democrat Senators there brought up the administration’s continuing refusal to produce documents to shed light on what Senator Roberts’ committee has continued to keep under wraps about Bolton’s share of the work to add back the sixteen inflammatory words in the State of the Union address which kicked off the Iraq conflict.
    Some of Bolton’s informal remarks in the hearing seemed more like passages from a Condoleezza Rice speech than his.

  11. Anonymous says:

    Re: Appeasement vs. Churchill. I’m not expert, but I read recently that Churchill was rabid about Germany since Weimar Republic days, with the implication that a stopped clock is right twice a day.

  12. Anonymous says:

    â€The British leadership, includung Chamberlain AND Churchill, knew they desperately needed to stall Germany til the radar came online.â€

    I don’t agree. It wasn’t until the â€sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales, Dec 10-1941,†by the Japanese and of course Pearl Harber, that the battleship’s susceptibility to airpower became apparent.

    No one wanted another war. The casualties from â€The Great War,†were horrific. The West saw Stalin, not Hitler, as the primary threat. Please recall all the labor unrest in the UK and the US during the 30’s. Hitler intentionally positioned himself to be more attractive to the West than Stalin. Those two reasons accounted for why no one wanted to listen to Churchill’s very accurate warnings about post-Weimar and Hitler.

    IMO, WWII is about the innate economic unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles, ending WWI. Versailles paved the way for political and economic disaster in Germany which Hitler replaced. Bush is trying to scapegoat the entire Middle East in the same way and he is providing incredibly fertile ground for leaders very similar to Hitler.

    *ilson zip code over at FDL has re-introduced the idea of some kind of Israeli pull back to pre ’67 war borders integrated with some kind of dmz, especially wrt Golan Heights and other strategic points. I had forgotten about this. In 2006 there are a lot of people in the ME who don’t care what Israel’s borders are, they want them out, completely. Wrt world opinion, however, Israel might find a lot more support if they were to put that on the table. Obviously that is absolutely not going to happen as they continue to destroy infrastrucutre in southern Lebanon, nor is Bush going to allow it. The Bush Administration’s Terrorist Creation Program is a stunning success.

  13. Anonymous says:

    Those two reasons accounted for why no one wanted to listen to Churchill’s very accurate warnings about post-Weimar and Hitler.â€
    There were other reasons too, but a third reason was the Roman Catholic Church that fanned the flames of anti-semitism in the 30’s. Taking on Hitler in the 30’s meant you got painted as pro-Stalin and pro-Jewish. As a result of his position on Hitler throughout the 30’s, Churchill was politically and financially broken by the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.