On Capitol Hill last week, Rahm Emmanuel, congressman and credited manager of last year's Democratic win of the legislature, was evicted from his party's house by a loud mob. The mob's leader demanded, at the podium microphone that was supposed to be Emmanuel's, unconditional surrender of a politically select battlefield.
Somewhere else in Washington, federal officials imparted, to New York Sun reporter Eli Lake, who-and-what information on a small number of Iranians seized in Baghdad this past December. Lake reported that which a third of Americans won't be disabused of: Iran does not "encourage" terrorists and criminal gangs in Iraq, it sponsors and guides them according to a deliberate strategy of influence and annexation.
And in the Oval Office, President Bush rehearses a speech to be delivered Wednesday night. It is one that will, if Lake's unidentified sources are worth the trouble, implicate the Iranian dictatorship in some measure as the president enunciates strategic changes on the Iraqi front that would satisfy domestic caprice. How far Bush's command can be taken no one knows, inasmuch as what's most obvious is the congressional majority of an opposition party that is just short of a politic way to concede one of two primary fronts advanced in the first five years of the war.
While that is in play, the rest of the world gets on, and whether or not Eli Lake's correspondents are right, Iran — we know from the ventriloquism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's handlers — is going to arm itself with an atomic bomb first and eradicate Jews within missile range second, and should that sequence engage, anything is possible third. George Bush has suffered from criticism that is unfair, at times dishonest. To see confidence in those who partly took power thereby and are willing, if not quite ready, to cut Near East democratists loose and appease one or several enemies, gnaws at the heart.
The trick to keeping Neville Chamberlain's invocation from becoming cant is in how vividly one recounts the times and ways Britain's prime minister was taken by Adolf Hitler, again and again, for a chump. The 1938 treaty flaunted as "Peace in Our Time" was signed by Germany's dictator in malign faith, but "as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again," in the language Chamberlain had seen to, the escape from a necessity to confront evil could not be more distant than in writer William Shirer's relation of this subject to captured German and Italian documents: "Hitler and Mussolini had already agreed at this very meeting in Munich that in time they would have to fight 'side by side' against Great Britain."
Chamberlain came late, but not too late, to reason. Just a little time is left for opponents of a war stance, if they want to take it, to call what George Bush has done, at the very least, haste. Then denial will be near impossibility. We can be thankful for this enemy's temerity and insistence; for all to see, they who will see.