Unfair to Neville

Something's been bugging me about this whole Iran thing, and its the unnecessary comparisons to Neville Chamberlain.

Simply put, the man gets a bad rap and he doesn't deserve to be compared to Barry.

For us World War I is just the war before the big war. But in Europe World War I is part of World War II.  We are barely aware of World War I's 100th anniversary.  In Europe they're going through deep convulsions of remembrance.  Britain lost 900,000 men, 20,000 alone during the first day of the Somme. That's 20,000 dead. In one day. Kinda puts Tarawa or Omaha Beach in perspective, don't it?  
You know that scene in "Gone with the Wind," where the casualty lists are coming in from Gettysburg? Imagine that, repeated all over Great Britain. Whole battalions were wiped out in minutes. These were locally recruited outfits, the "pals" battalions. All gone in an instant.

The Battle of the Somme was the most important thing to happen to Britain in the last 100 years, and the British are living with its consequences to this day. The Battle of the Somme marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire.

So, in 1938 Chamberlain was desperate to avoid a war. So was his country. Chamberlain had an agreement backed by France and the other powers that he thought would keep the peace. Okay, he took the measure of Hitler and got it wrong.

But when the Polish crisis erupted the next year Chamberlain got it right. He came to understand there could be no peace with Hitler. So, when Germany invaded Poland, Chamberlain declared war. He got Czechoslovakia wrong but he got Poland right.

I'm not trying to reinterpret the man's moves or claim he was a good prime minister. He wasn't. He got Hitler totally wrong. But in the end he recognized his mistake and changed.

By the way, there's probably a subset of readers who believe that Chamberlain resigned after the loss of France in 1940. Not so.  He resigned after Norway was lost. Mighty Winston Churchill lost France.