Benjamin Netanyahu surely sees himself as a kind of Winston Churchill warning against the appeasement strategy of a Neville Chamberlain-like Barack Obama. Obama, like Chamberlain, has made serial concessions in an attempt to appease a tyrannical regime, as Chamberlain did in Munich in 1938, and with at least one similar motivation, to avoid the horrors of war; although Chamberlain had fewer illusions about changing the character of Hitler’s regime than Obama seems to have about changing Iran’s.
Whether you agree with Netanyahu’s view or not, there was at least one clear echo of Churchill in Netanyahu’s speech to Congress Tuesday. In addressing the argument that the current leaders of Iran’s government (who are subject of course to the edicts of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini) are moderates, Netanyahu said, “Now, two years ago, we were told to give President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif a chance to bring change and moderation to Iran.” A pause. “Some change!” Another pause. “Some moderation!”
The Churchillian text comes from his speech to the Canadian Parliament on Dec. 30, 1941. The United States had entered World War II earlier that month, and Churchill spent the previous week conferring (and living) in the White House with Franklin Roosevelt. Canada, as Churchill noted, had been fighting — valiantly — at the side of Britain for two years and three months. Churchill reprised that history and recalled how France’s civilian and military leaders surrendered to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in June 1940, and advised Churchill as British Prime Minister to do the same. “When I warned them that Britain would fight on whatever they did,” Churchill said, “their generals told their prime minister and his divided Cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” A pause. “Some chicken!” Another pause. “Some neck.”
I wonder how many in the audience in the Capitol or watching on television caught the reference. Or whether Barack Obama, who famously expelled the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office, did.
