The Neville Chamberlain in George Bush

Like the boy who cried wolf, the right keeps shouting about Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister whose "appeasement" of Adolf Hitler famously failed to prevent the WWII. From the right-wing perspective, George Bush is another Churchill standing tall against the relentless aggression of bin Laden, Iran, and North Korea.

But that's all nonsense. As David Thielen argued back in March, it's George Bush who should be considered our own Neville Chamberlain.

Above all, Chamberlain's appeasement policy was based on a tragid misreading of Hitler's intentions and a stubborn refusal to adjust to reality. President Bush has been just as inept in dealing with the situation in Iraq. In assuming that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11, cooperating with al-Qaeda, and harboring Hitler-like ambitions of global domination, Bush was as grossly mistaken as Chamberlain was about Hitler.

Bush's assumption that Iraq could be transformed into a Western-style democracy was another monumental miscalculation. The Bush administration has huffed and puffed with a constitution, elections, and a parliament, but Iraq is much closer to being dual Sunni and Shiite theocracies than the secular democracy that Bush originally projected. Today, Bush's rhetoric of a "free Iraq" is just as hollow as Chamberlain's proclamation of "peace in our time."

And the Bush administration still hasn't adjusted to the situation on the ground in Iraq! Dick Cheney is still talking about Saddam Hussein's assumed cooperation with al-Qaeda despite being refuted a thousand times. Likewise, it took the Bush administration four full years, 3,000 American combat deaths, and over 50,000 Iraqi civilian deaths to realize that they didn't have enough troops to deal with the problems posed by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. Even then, the troop increase of 20,000 is much smaller than the numbers demanded by Petraeus' counter-insurgency doctrine and too small to have a decisive impact. Like the Expeditionary Force that Neville Chamberlain sent to France, the "surge" is too little and too late.

Finally, President Bush has been repudiated by the American public just as decisively as Neville Chamberlain was repudiated by British public opinion after the invasion of Poland. The GOP got a "thumpin'" in the Congressional elections last fall, President Bush's approval ratings have been stuck in the low to mid thirties, and 2/3rd's of the American public wants to either withdraw troops from Iraq immediately or set a deadline for withdrawal in 2008. In 1939, the British were so fed up that even Chamberlain's friends were calling on the leader of the Labor Party opposition to "speak for England." That's now the case with the American public which is looking to Nancy Pelosi to "speak for America" and believes that Congress rather than the President should have the primary voice in managing the war in Iraq.

Of course, Neville Chamberlain was forced to give way to his chief critic Winston Churchill because Britain's parliamentary system makes it possible for governments to "fall" if they lose public confidence between elections. Unfortunately for us in America, we're stuck with George Bush, our own version of Neville Chamberlain, until January 2009.