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Any discussion of "peace with honor" should start with recognition that the phrase is a quotation which was heavily fraught with historical significance long before the US used it regarding Vietnam: 1. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) returned from the 1878 Congress of Berlin bearing rather mixed results from the British viewpoint but claimed (some say boasted) they amounted to "peace with honour." 2. More famously, or perhaps infamously, prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned on 30 September 1938 from the Munich Conference which at Hitler's insistence severely truncated Czechoslovakia, brandished a worthless Anglo-German declaration that the two states would never go to war, and proclaimed, "My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time." Sally Marks
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