News Abroad

Neville Chamberlain's Real Mistake--And Bush's

by Jeff Shear

Mr. Shear is writing a book about espionage entitled, The Honey Trap, for Raincoast Books. He is the author of The Keys to the Kingdom, an investigation into a weapons deal between the U.S. and Japan, by Doubleday. He is a former Staff Correspondent at National Journal.

What's new about the old tale of politicians abusing intelligence? Not a lot, as the "Scooter" Libby trial demonstrates. Whether the administration saw what it wanted to see in Ambassador Joseph Wilson's report from Nigeria about the non-sale of yellow cake uranium to Iraq, or the administration manufactured what it wanted the nation to believe about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush White House’s capacity for magical thinking (to borrow a phrase from author and political essayist Joan Didion) mistakenly brought the nation to war. And that brings to mind Neville Chamberlain.

In a parallel tale of pre-war delusion, the British Secret Intelligence Service carefully added up and recorded the many sins of the Third Reich, beginning early in the 1930s. By the time Neville Chamberlain came to office in 1937, Hitler was a known quantity. In 1933, he had eliminated political parties, with the exception of his own, the Nazis. He then quit the League of Nations and tripled the size of his Army, tossing out the arms restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. A year later, he appointed himself dictator, Fuehrer. In 1935, he instituted a military draft and promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of their rights as German citizens. The next year, he invaded the Rhineland. Overshadowed by the Spanish Civil in 1937, he tested his Junkers bombers against the town of Guernica. Chamberlain became Prime Minister a few weeks later in May and two days after that, Nazi bombers attacked the Spanish town of Almeria, a reprisal raid as Goering described it.

So then, what could Chamberlain possibly have been thinking when he chose a policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler? Well, the obvious. The Great War was an all too recent and vivid memory fresh with the horrors of mustard gas and aerial bombs, mechanized fighting machines, and the spattering death of machine guns. An entire generation had been lost, to victor and vanquished alike. It didn't take much imagination for men of peace and good will to see that Germany had only recently clawed its way out of an economic abyss, and that Versailles had imposed a vindictive and harsh peace. Perhaps Germany did in fact have legitimate claims on honor and traditional territory. The thought of another Great War with even more horrendous weaponry after so brief an interval of just 20 years was appalling. So, appeasement.

But Chamberlain should have known better. British intelligence had developed dramatic and damning evidence of Nazi duplicity in the weeks leading up to the Prime Minister's crucial meeting with Hitler at Munich. An MI6 agent, we now know, produced actual maps of Nazi war objectives. The operative, who happened to be an American named Betty Pack (and later code-named Cynthia), entered the offices of Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-surrogate Sudenten-German Party and stole the maps, which laid out Hitler's plans for Czechoslovakia, the focus of ongoing peace talks.

Moreover, as the Anglo-German summits leading up to the four-power conference gathered momentum, -- first at the Berchtesgaden on September 15 and next at Bad Godesberg on September 22 -- the same agent provided British intelligence with confirming evidence directly from Polish sources who had met with both Hitler and Goering during the Nuremberg Rallies, which began on September 12, 1938. Despite the time compression and the urgency of Hitler’s demands, such intelligence should have at least delayed Chamberlain’s determined march toward appeasement. Instead, he stated with utter credulity that Hitler was a leader who "would not lie to someone he respected."

It is for this reason, of course, that President Bush regularly invokes the ghost of Neville Chamberlain in defense of his Iraq policy, though less frequently in the months since the report of the Iraq Study Group. His arguments against appeasement have their merit as the awful failure of Chamberlain’s policies proves. However, arguing over appeasement obscures the irony, which is that Bush, like Chamberlain before him, fell victim to magical thinking, swilling policy bromides while ignoring intelligence professionals. In the case of Chamberlain, disregarding the evidence resulted in appeasement and World War Two; in the case of Bush, it led to a pre-emptive war in Iraq. Thus, both world leaders each failed on their own merits.

In his 2004 book, Plan of Attack, describing why Bush “decided to launch a preemptive war in Iraq,” Washington Post assistant managing editor, Bob Woodward, quoted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld telling the President, “It’s particularly important that I talk to George Tenet,” the director of the CIA, about “removing Saddam Hussein.” The president agreed but, as Rumsfeld told Woodward, Bush did not want the intelligence director to know anything about his plans. In other words, the President wanted a plan for war, but he didn’t want the CIA to know about it. Intelligence be damned? Apparently this bizarre and backwards approach to the world changing matter of war gnawed sufficiently at Woodward so that two years later he confronted the President with his orders to Rumsfeld. Why not get CIA in on the ground floor, he asked Bush. The President responded that he feared that by making his plans more widely known he risked a leak to the media. A leak from the director of CIA? Woodward never followed up.

Subsequently, in the beginning of February 2007, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general did follow up. He issued a report rebuking Douglas J. Feith, an aide to Rumsfeld who served as under secretary of defense for policy for the Bush administration until 2005. The I.G. said that Feith “developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.” He did not note, as Woodward had reported, that the path to war began without consultation with the intelligence community; indeed that an order had been given to keep the director of the CIA out of the loop.

Now, with further debate in progress over intelligence implicating Iran in the Iraq insurgency, which adds additional heat to the intelligence debate over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the lessons of Munich are once again invoked, once again for the wrong reasons. For as the case of Neville Chamberlain should remind us: the sin of appeasement was really the sin of magical thinking, failing to take caution from intelligence estimates in order to forward policy aims at odds with reality. Appeasement and pre-emption may both have their place in a dangerous world, but history teaches us that one may be more dangerous than the other in the absence of dispassionate and objective analysis grounded in long-term national self-interest.