Alistair Cooke, BBC broadcaster, is now about 95 years old.

About the author: In 1936, the NBC network
invited Alistair Cooke to do a weekly broadcast of
reflections on British life called London Letter.
Cooke then emigrated to the United States in
1937, and asked the BBC to let him do the same
thing in reverse. Eventually he succeeded, and
'Letter from America' is now the longest running
radio broadcast in human history. In the process
it has won a faithful worldwide audience of
several million and many friends in high places.
When Cooke was awarded an honorary
knighthood in 1973, the Queen is reputed to have
expressed bewildered admiration at his ability to
sit down, week after week, and communicate so
directly with his audience.

I promised to lay off topic A - Iraq - until the
Security Council makes a judgment 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 twelve
years but only two years before, when he broke
the First World War peace treaty by occupying
the demilitarized 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 ten million
of eleven 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
Labor 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 thirty, 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 mechanized 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 savior.

Now, this memory of mine may be totally
irrelevant to the present crisis. But 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.... All rights reserved;
all wrongs revenged.

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