Vous n'en pensez pas moins

Imagine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia—with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938—the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn’t happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.

Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in “regime change,” gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!

Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression [*], Edward S. Herman et David Peterson, 31 mars 2007



* A shorter, standard op-ed length version of this commentary was drafted and submitted very widely across the major U.S. print media—and found to be 100 percent unpublishable.