I've spent weeks now wrestling with the huge literature on appeasement. Not altogether surprised how an initial focus on individual character failings of the main actors in the memoirs of others who were sometimes the earliest rats off the ship has been replaced by a blander, structural analysis that stresses impersonal constraints. What I can't get is the ethical 'air' breathed by the main actors, who by their own account, and that of their critics, were moral men, Halifax nauseatingly so. Chamberlain is quite revealing since in his diaries/letters to Hilda and Ida he trots out trite childhood maxims: 'if at first you don;t succeed, try try again' and so forth. There's a lot of playing the game- though neither 'Master' Hitler nor 'Musso' played cricket- and Germany being sent to Coventry. The analogy has obviously cropped up time and again in Western foreign policy- Suez, Falklands, Iraq and now Iran- and Bush has been deploying it against Obama over troop reductions in Iraq. Maybe it works like this. Britain had to choose not to fight Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously and prioritised the threats and her own capabilities. Nowadays, with three wars- Afghanistan, Iraq and global terrorism- can we afford another with Iran? Where is the contemporary alternative to the alternative Churchill proposed in the 1930s- that is of a Grand Alliance to protect victims of aggression- Czechoslovakia then, Israel now? Just a thought on the lessons of history.