In the Telegraph (registration required), John Keegan describes the "new appeasement", and compares it unfavorably to the appeasement of Hitler.

It is not simply that appeasement was then official policy, and that those who denounced it were out of power. More important, the appeasement of the inter-war years was certainly understandable and even justifiable.

The fear of a new European war, likely to be brought on by standing up to Hitler, affected almost every family in the land. Britain had suffered 750,000 battle deaths in the First World War. Only 15 of England's 10,000 villages had not lost a son, husband or father. It was wholly explicable that families would support almost any diplomatic concession that staved off war.
There lies another difference. The dictators, Hitler foremost, were immensely powerful. Their armed forces were huge. Moreover, they made their demands clear and were cunning at representing them as trifling surrenders. The dictators made it easy for their potential victims to buy time or respite of a threat. A little slice of someone else's territory, a relaxation of disarmament laws. What, the appeasers asked, was really being given away?

The history of appeasement does not change. Hitler was once a weak little man - and it was the concessions of the appeasers of his day that allowed him to grow strong. Once Saddam has his nuclear weapons, he will beat the drum of war. It will be a war that the new appeasers, like the old appeasers who rallied to Churchill after Hitler's first blitzkrieg, will bitterly regret that they did not fight when they had the chance to win.