Bush Repudiates Yalta & Fifty Years of U.S. Foreign Policy

I’m generally enjoying the boiling cauldron that George Bush is making of U.S.-Russian relations during his current trip there.  It’s about time Bush spoke out in opposition to Putin’s hardening  dictatorship.  But not content to needle Putin mercilessly, Bush has made another one of his revolutionary, astonishing statements repudiating yet another sacred cow of U.S. foreign policy.

Bush in Latvia as he repudiated FDR,
Yalta, & 50 years of U.S. policy (credit:
Krisanne Johnson)

In a speech this weekend in Latvia, George Bush did something remarkable.  He repudiated fifty years of U.S. policy toward Russia (the former Soviet Union).  Bush and his neocon Rasputins have decided that FDR’s Yalta treaty was an absolute betrayal of Baltic States and Eastern European countries who came under Stalin’s thrall.  Here’s what he said:

The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of
Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful
governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow
expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of
stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of
millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the
greatest wrongs of history.

Yalta as evil as Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact??  Perhaps the most perfidious diplomatic agreement in modern history, which allowed the Germans to turn their full attention to the assault on Britain and granted Hitler a reprieve until he could prepare his military machine for the eventual invasion of Russian which he was probably planning all along–Yalta as bad as this?  What lunacy!

How about this bit of hyperbolic nonsense:

The captivity of
millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the
greatest wrongs of history.

Oh really?  Not a great wrong or even one of the great wrongs, but one of the GREATEST wrongs.  Greater than the Holocaust, the near extermination of Native Americans, the Armenian genocide?  Come on, Mr. Bush.  History blushes at the egregious distortions to which it is subjected at your hands.

By including Munich in his speech, Bush means to call up the nasty image of Neville Chamberlain waving that seedy paper in his hand which he claimed would guarantee "peace in our time," but which of course guaranteed only war.  He means to conjure up the terms "appeasement" and the idea that FDR, like Chamberlain before him capitulated to tyranny.  And of course, this flows directly into Bush’s defense of the war with Iraq.  We had to invade Iraq because you can’t negotiate with tyrants, etc., etc.  Those who oppose Bush policy are of course nothing more than the appeasers of yore.  In fact, he spells this out in the speech:

…We recognize the end of
the Cold War as part of an even broader movement in our world. From
Germany and Japan after World War II, to Latin America, to Asia, and
Central and Eastern Europe, and now to the broader Middle East, the
advance of freedom is the great story of our age. And in this history,
there are important lessons…We have learned that governments accountable to
citizens are peaceful, while dictatorships stir resentments and hatred
to cover their own failings. We have learned that the skeptics and
pessimists are often wrong, because men and women in every culture,
when given the chance, will choose liberty. We have learned that even
after a long wait in the darkness of tyranny, freedom can arrive
suddenly, like the break of day.  And we have learned that the demand
for self-government is often driven and sustained by patriotism, by the
traditions and heroes and language of a native land.

Take that, you nasty skeptics who oppose my Iraq policy.  History will judge you for the wet noodles that you are.

Nested in that paragraph is another doozy: "governments accountable to
citizens are peaceful, while dictatorships stir resentments and hatred
to cover their own failings."  I wouldn’t disagree much with the second half of this statement, but the first half??  Are we being peaceful in Iraq?  Unless of course Bush means to say that his government is not accountable which is a reasonable supposition, I’m afraid.  Is Israeli policy toward the Palestinians peaceful?  The list could go on and on.

Actually, Paul Wolfowitz is the intellectual author of this idea as quoted from an interview he did with Charlie Rose: "The lesson of history is that democracies don’t initiate wars of aggression."  The problem with these twistings and distortions of the historical record is that no one (well, not enough people) seems to call these bastards on them.  How do Bush and Wolfowitz get away with this crap?  If I were their history professors I’d give them a failing grade.  But they run the goddamn country for Pete’s sake!

I doubt that Bush has a clue who Molotov or von Ribbentrop were, let alone what their Pact was.  No doubt, his neocon handlers conceived of this speech and its contents.  We should call this neocon revisionism as they seem to wish to rewrite most of American history, including its diplomatic history.

According to this neocon revisionist approach, I guess we should’ve gone to war with Stalin so that his usurpation wouldn’t stand.  Fortunately, the eminent Arthur Schlesinger has weighed in at HuffingtonPost.com with his critique of the Bush speech:

The American president is under the delusion that tougher diplomacy
might have preserved the freedom of small East European nations. He
forgets the presence of the Red Army. No conceivable diplomacy could
have saved Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation. And military action
against the Soviet Union was inconceivable so long as the Pacific War
was still going on…

As for Eastern Europe, Stalin "held all the cards" in the words of
Charles E. Bohlen, the Russian expert [and U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union]. But FDR managed to extract an astonishing document – the Declaration on Liberated Europe, an eloquent affirmation of "the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live." Molotov warned Stalin against
signing it, but he signed it anyway. It was a grave diplomatic blunder.
In order to consolidate Soviet control, Stalin had to break the Yalta
agreements – which therefore could not have been in his favor.

The Declaration stands as the refutation of the myth, given new
currency by the president of the United States , that Yalta caused or
ratified the division of Europe . It was the deployment of armies, not
negotiating concessions, that caused the division of Europe.