What if Munich had happened differently?

In history, as with most things, the "what if's" are difficult. We don't really know what would have happened when it did not happen. To a certain extent, any statement of causality is based on a "what if": when we say x caused y, we are saying "what if x never happened....would y not have happened, too?" But historians are admonished not to go too far on that track, lest they be trapped in a series of mutually reinforcing hypotheticals.

That is the difficulty that those who appeal to some variant of the "Munich syndrome" flirt with, and it is also the difficulty I am about to flirt with in this blog post. For those who aren't familiar, here's the story of Munich:

In 1938, Hitler threatened to take over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. This was an area that had a large number of ethnically German inhabitants and was the part of Czechoslovakia that, being mountainous, was militarily most defensible, and Hitler's saw this as one step in his attempt to dominate eastern Europe. The major European powers at the time that could have stopped Hitler--the UK and France--met in a a conference with Hitler, and they foolishly declined to invite the other major European power that might have stopped him, the Soviet Union. The British and French conferees, led by Neville Chamberlain, agreed to let Hitler take over the Sudetenland on the promise that he would take no other territory. Early the next year, Hitler ordered the invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in August, he set his sights on Poland. The Soviet Union, ostracized by the western European powers, made an alliance with Hitler, and thus did not stop--indeed, took its share--when Germany invaded Poland in September.

The lesson that people, in hindsight, are to take from this is that Chamberlain et al. should have stopped aggression when they could and not coddle it to the point where it was unmanageable. The idea was that Hitler might have been stopped much earlier, or at least might have been forced to play his war card when Germany was in a less strategically favorable position.

Here's my take--my "what if"--on what might plausibly have happened if Chamberlain had done all that he in retrospect was supposed to have done (invite the Soviet Union to the conference (and the Czechoslovaks, who had been excluded from the actual conference), stood firm against Hitler's position, and gone to war if he had insisted on invading the Sudetenland). Here are what I see as the most likely scenarios:

1. Faced with the possibility of a two-, even three-front war (Russia on the East, Czechoslovakia to the southeast, and France and UK to the West), Hitler might have backed down, and war would not have only been diverted, but effectively prevented. Yet at the same time, a brutal dictatorship would be kept in power for x number of years, maybe to fall at the hands of a liberal-democratic revolution, maybe to fall to a succession of aggressive military juntas, maybe to lead to a bigger war in the 1950s or 1960s.
   
2. Hitler might have invaded the Sudetenland, making World War II start 1 year earlier than it actually did. In this scenario, the war might have ended more quickly because the Soviet Union would not only have been in the war to prevent the invasion, Hitler's army would have to fight first in Czechoslovakia and not later in Poland. Or, the war might have dragged on and been something like a replay of World War I. Or, of course, some other possibility....
   

My point here is not merely to replay the "what if" game with all its potential "what if" fallacies and rough guestimates. In truth, other than the World War II books I used to read as an adolescent, I have done no real research in 20th century European diplomacy when it comes to World War II. My point is, rather, to ask how we might have perceived Munich.

If scenario 1 had happened, Munich might have seemed a success but also as part of a balance-of-power politics that kept in power, even as it checked, a brutal dictator who oppressed hundreds of thousands of his own people with his racist regime. If scenario 2 had happened, it might have been seen as the same thing, if the war ended quickly, or it might have seemed like 1914 all over again, leading to a long war of attrition. Of course, other things might have happened as well; we don't know.

My larger point is that if Chamberlain et al. had stood firm and Munich had "worked" like it was supposed to, we would not have known it with the certainty that some of us claim to know it now that it happened differently. I guess I have merely rediscovered the aphorism that "hindsight is 20/20," but it is helpful to know that our mistakes are more apparent than our right decisions.

Won't be fooled again....part II

In the preceding post (click here to see it), I chastised Mr. Kopel at the Volokh. Conspiracy for what I considered his "rah rah let's go to war and isn't it splendid" attitude in a post he wrote on the U.N.'s resolution that can be interpreted as authorizing almost any military action short of occupation to assist the rebels in Libya.

I should note that Qadaffi has at least made a gesture in response to this UN resolution, claiming to have instituted a cease fire. There is much skepticism about this: he has publicly said he is issuing a cease fire, but as of yesterday evening, it appears that he either really hasn't or that his military hasn't gotten the memo or that, maybe more or maybe less disturbingly, "his" own factions are not obeying him and he doesn't have control over his own army (the latter I have not heard anyone mention, but I find it at least possible).

To the extent that I believed--and I think I did, although I did not say so in that post--that the UN resolution would lead to nothing but bloodshed and a quagmire, I might have been wrong, although events still need to bear out one way or another. And to the extent I believed that early and more expeditious US intervention would have done the same thing, I also might have been wrong, although that proposition, remaining a hypothetical, isn't something I'd bet my apartment lease on.

But this I do not recant: war, even when necessary and the right thing to do, should never be entered into or considered joyously, but with somber deliberation, and not with slogans and chants from the French Revolution.

Won't be fooled again.....

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Kopel, staunch and valiant defender of freedom, is celebrating the decision by the United Nations to authorize limited intervention in Libya. In an updated to one of his posts (click here to read the post in its entirety), Mr. Kopel says:

Wall Street Journal reports that Egyptian army is shipping arms to the Libyan “rebels.” Which is to say, to the legitimate government of Libya. As the Declaration of Independence affirms, the only legitimate governments are those founded on the consent of the governed. Accordingly, the Gaddafi gang was never a legitimate government, merely a large gang of criminals who controlled a big territory. The French government’s diplomatic recognition of the legitimate Libyan government reflects this fact. @liamstack reports that France says it will be ready within hours to fly over Libya. @lilianwagdy says that Libyans in France are chanting “Zanga Zanga, Dar Dar, We will get you Muamar!” Vive la France! Vive Sarkozy! Vive les droits de l’homme!

Now, I'll admit that Qadaffi probably doesn't have the consent of the governed, or at least a significant portion of the governed, to claim legitimacy, and maybe he never did. Maybe the rebels are part of a grand humanitarian plan a la "droits de l'homme" (an unfortunate allusion....look at how that revolution turned out), but surely we--by which I mean myself and Mr. Kopel, although not necessarily someone with a deeper knowledge of North Africa--don't know that the rebels have the consent of enough of the governed, or that they will not fall apart in factions, or that they will not go on murderous rampages.

Who knows where this will lead. If I've learned anything from studying history, it's that it's almost impossible to learn from history: the guns of August were not Munich was not Vietnam was not Gulf War I was not Gulf War II is not Libya. And who knows, maybe if the American empire should last for another 30 years, people will look back and still say "this was one of its better hours."

For some reason, I keep thinking of a passage from the novel Catch-22 (and I quote almost verbatim):

Colonel Cathcart had courage. He was never afraid to volunteer his men for any assignment.

For what it's worth, I am not a pacifist--I'm not even a "functional pacifist"--but before we start polishing off our dusty copies of the Declaration of Independence and Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, maybe we should realize that war, even if it's for the best and engaged in to prevent even greater evils than may already be happening, comes at the cost of suffering and the cost of being the ones to inflict suffering.

There are none righteous, no, not one. There's only us, and we're all too human.