As in most crises, so, too, in the case of Iraq, analogies to the 1930s and Munich are being drawn. Saddam is Hitler, the French and Germans the appeasers, Bush is Churchill. Fox News' Brit Hume has dubbed French Foreign Minister De Villepin a Vichyite.
President Bush, too, sees close comparisons, warning that if the UN does not show more “backbone,” it risks going the way of the League of Nations, ending up as an international “debating society.”
But what really happened to the League? Why did it fail?
Created at the Paris Peace Conference, the League's Covenant was embedded in the text of the Versailles Treaty at the insistence of its great patron Woodrow Wilson. But when the U.S. Senate proposed reservations to the Covenant, to protect U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action, the president rejected them all. The Senate then rejected the treaty, and the United States never joined the League.
