Winston Bush

Talk about no good deed going unpunished. Karl Rove took the trouble to send a friendly note to author Lynne Olson in praise of her book about the "troublesome young men" who supported Churchill's stand against Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. Ms. Olson turned around and wrote, for the Washington Post of all places, an oped piece mocking President Bush for keeping a bust of Churchill in his office and claiming that "the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out — but they're between Bush and Chamberlain."

Olson couldn't have more completely disconnected words from their meaning. She begins her supposed parallels between Mr. Bush and Chamberlain with the fact that both lacked experience in foreign affairs before coming to office. True, but the same was true of most American presidents and, for that matter, British prime ministers. All the more remarkable that Mr. Bush understood the same thing that Churchill did and Chamberlain didn't — and rose to the challenge posed not only by Saddam's defiance of the United Nations but also if Islamist terror had decided to fight it.

Ms. Olson claims that Chamberlain and Mr. Bush were both unilateralists, in contrast to Churchill. In fact, Mr. Bush took the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with him in Afghanistan. In Iraq, he was enforcing United Nations resolutions. But it wasn't the League of Nations that defeated Hitler, any more than the U.N. removed Saddam. In both cases, a coalition of the willing did the job. When the French opposed him, Mr. Bush merely ignored them. Churchill sank their fleet.

Then Ms. Olson alleges that Bush, like Chamberlain, usurped executive authority, whereas Churchill revered Parliament and civil liberties. Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum. Chamberlain's refusal to listen to critics was indeed notorious. But wartime leaders always demand emergency powers, and legislators usually grant them, as they did to both Churchill and Roosevelt in their day and to Bush after 9/11. Security measures since 2001 have been mild compared to those of the 1940s; Churchill's program of spying made Mr. Bush's interception of international cell phone calls look positively dainty.

Ms. Olson has it in her head that Churchill would have "snorted" at any comparison between Islamists and Nazis. She fails to quote Churchill's own views on the Islamists, perhaps because they are too harsh for a family newspaper. Let us just say that it is true that the war on terror has to be prosecuted differently from a conventional war. But no serious historian could imagine that Churchill would have dismissed the threat posed by a global terrorist network, supported by rogue states, and capable of striking at the heart of Britain, not to mention America.

The essential difference between Churchill and Chamberlain was but that Chamberlain was prepared to appease Hitler because he believed that there was no other way to preserve "peace for our time." Churchill rejected appeasement, because he believed it was morally wrong and politically catastrophic. Nowadays the appeasers call themselves "realists," but their realpolitik is no more realistic than Chamberlain's betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Those who just want to get out of Iraq are proposing to sacrifice a fledgling democracy for the same illusory peace. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush unhesitatingly chose war rather than appeasement.

While the jury is still out on how our leaders will stand up to Iran, Mr. Bush, more than any leader of his time has gambled on the principle that the jihad against the West cannot be appeased, only defeated; that in dealing with fanatics, all negotiation can achieve is to put off the day when they must be confronted. When Chamberlain returned from Munich, he found Churchill waiting for him in the House of Commons with a warning that "the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course." No wonder Mr. Bush has that bust of Churchill looking over his shoulder.