The Franco-German plan will be DOA at the Security Council. Britain and the US would veto it.
What they need to do is not "start" to cooperate, they need to cooperate fully. That means surrender. Now. Perhaps the French can show them how.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/2720441.stm
Alister Cooke: BBC
Peace for our time.
I promised to lay off topic A - Iraq - until the Security Council makes a
judgement on the inspectors' report and I shall keep that promise.
But I must tell you that throughout the past fortnight I've listened to
everybody involved in or looking on to a monotonous din of words, like a
tide crashing and receding on a beach - making a great noise and saying the
same thing over and over.
And this ordeal triggered a nightmare - a day-mare, if you like.
Through the ceaseless tide I heard a voice, a very English voice of an old
man - Prime Minister Chamberlain saying: "I believe it is peace for our
time" - a sentence that prompted a huge cheer, first from a listening street
crowd and then from the House of Commons and next day from every newspaper
in the land.
There was a move to urge that Mr Chamberlain should receive the Nobel Peace
Prize.
In Parliament there was one unfamiliar old grumbler to growl out: "I
believe we have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat."
He was, in view of the general sentiment, very properly booed down.
This scene concluded in the autumn of 1938 the British prime minister's
effectual signing away of most of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
The rest of it, within months, Hitler walked in and conquered.
"Oh dear," said Mr Chamberlain, thunderstruck. "He has betrayed my trust."
During the last fortnight a simple but startling thought occurred to me -
every single official, diplomat, president, prime minister involved in the
Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them unborn. So the dreadful
scene I've just drawn will not have been remembered by most listeners.
Hitler had started betraying our trust not 12 years but only two years
before, when he broke the First World War peace treaty by occupying the
demilitarised zone of the Rhineland.
Only half his troops carried one reload of ammunition because Hitler knew
that French morale was too low to confront any war just then and 10 million of 11 million British voters had signed a so-called peace ballot.
It stated no conditions, elaborated no terms, it simply counted the numbers
of Britons who were "for peace".
The slogan of this movement was "Against war and fascism" - chanted at the
time by every Labour man and Liberal and many moderate Conservatives - a
slogan that now sounds as imbecilic as "against hospitals and disease".
In blunter words a majority of Britons would do anything, absolutely
anything, to get rid of Hitler except fight him.
At that time the word pre-emptive had not been invented, though today it's a
catchword.
After all the Rhineland was what it said it was - part of Germany. So to
march in and throw Hitler out would have been pre-emptive - wouldn't it?
Nobody did anything and Hitler looked forward with confidence to gobbling up
the rest of Western Europe country by country - "course by course", as
growler Churchill put it.
I bring up Munich and the mid-30s because I was fully grown, on the verge of
30, and knew we were indeed living in the age of anxiety.
And so many of the arguments mounted against each other today, in the last
fortnight, are exactly what we heard in the House of Commons debates and
read in the French press.
The French especially urged, after every Hitler invasion, "negotiation,
negotiation".
They negotiated so successfully as to have their whole country defeated and
occupied.
But as one famous French leftist said: "We did anyway manage to make them
declare Paris an open city - no bombs on us!"
In Britain the general response to every Hitler advance was disarmament and
collective security.
Collective security meant to leave every crisis to the League of Nations.
It would put down aggressors, even though, like the United Nations, it had
no army, navy or air force.
The League of Nations had its chance to prove itself when Mussolini invaded
and conquered Ethiopia (Abyssinia).
The League didn't have any shot to fire. But still the cry was chanted in
the House of Commons - the League and collective security is the only true
guarantee of peace.
But after the Rhineland the maverick Churchill decided there was no
collectivity in collective security and started a highly unpopular campaign
for rearmament by Britain, warning against the general belief that Hitler
had already built an enormous mechanised army and superior air force.
But he's not used them, he's not used them - people protested.
Still for two years before the outbreak of the Second War you could read the
debates in the House of Commons and now shiver at the famous Labour men -
Major Attlee was one of them - who voted against rearmament and still went
on pointing to the League of Nations as the saviour.
Now, this memory of mine may be totally irrelevant to the present crisis.
It haunts me.
I have to say I have written elsewhere with much conviction that most
historical analogies are false because, however strikingly similar a new
situation may be to an old one, there's usually one element that is
different and it turns out to be the crucial one.
It may well be so here. All I know is that all the voices of the 30s are
echoing through 2003.