What's behind door number three

Here's another interesting thing I've discovered about Rapturemaniacs:  for people who are so self-assured in their ability to map out the End Times down to the second, they are mysteriously unable to come up with a cogent answer for which Middle Eastern country has to get blown up in order to bring about Armageddon.  Every time conflict breaks out, like last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war, they start honing their harp-playing skills as if This Could Be the One. 

If I were them, I'd just lob a few nukes at the place and figure one of 'em has to hit the right button.  Which, unfortunately, seems to be more or less the direction they're headed.  Via this DKos diary, a NYT story on our favorite fundigelicals banging the Iran war drums.  Because maybe the Jesus Elevator is hidden in Tehran...

Some evangelical leaders say they are wary of reports that a panel including former Secretary of State James A. Baker III might recommend negotiating with Iran about the future of Iraq. "It certainly bothers me," said Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most influential conservative Christians. "That has the same kind of feel to it as the British negotiating with Germany, Italy and Japan in the run up to World War II."

Dear oh dear.  What will we ever do with the Good Doctor?  For Pete's sake, man, just stop trying to rewrite history to bolster your weak point.  You don't care about an honest reflection on history, and your endless army of tools doesn't care about philosophy or law or science or anything else beyond whatever mangled, formulaic bastardization they gin up to obfuscate their arguments which are otherwise rooted solely on dogma.  (You don't care about democracy, either, but I'll get to that.)

But I'm not just going to pick on you here.  Truth is, this is an old slapdown that every hawk thinks he has in his back pocket.  Whenever you try to suggest that diplomacy might be the solution to a rogue head of state, out comes the ghost of Neville Chamberlain.  It's the inverse of Godwin's Law; the hawk you're debating will immediately become smug and victorious waiting for you to defend not taking preemptive action against Nazi Germany.  There are many reasons why this is not the trump card they imagine.  Among them:

• It robs the history from its context.  At the time, Europe was still recovering from the Great War, which was a terrible quagmire no one was eager to relive, and what most people thought another war would simply be a replay of.  Heck, the French thought this up until they watched the Wehrmacht walk around the Maginot line into Paris

• It assumes that ,had the Allies attacked earlier, they would've won.  This is not a given.  Britain and France nearly lost anyway, and an earlier war likely would not have brought the Soviets or the United States into the fight any more quickly.

"But," they will protest, "what about the Holocaust?  Shirley you can't object to intervening on behalf of the population facing extinction!"  Yes, I can, Shirley.  Because while many in the West were aware of the racial proclivities of the Nazis, it amounted, before 1939, to some institutional discrimination and political prisoners so far as they were concerned.  And heck, the USA at the time was all about the institutional discrimination.  The "Final Solution" wasn't introduced until the war had already started, and it would be until the war was nearly over until many people realized the scope of what had happened.

You might wonder why the neocon hawks are so enamored of the British leaders during WWII; imagining themselves as barreling Chruchillian nobles sticking their collective thumb in the eye of weak-kneed liberal Chamberlains.  They will occasionally mutter about FDR's isolationism, but only meekly, because that was the overwhelming mood in the country at the time, and because their conservative forbears were even more isolationist.  Some, including Charles Lindbergh and Charles Coughlin, the father of modern gasbag radio, were outright Nazi sympathizers.  Re-purposing themselves as British is merely an attempt to erase another historical conservative embarrassment and to deflect praise from the man whose legacy they resent more than any 20th-century figure:  Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

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