That Damned Roosevelt

When I read the headline that read: "Bush: U.S. Had Hand in European Divisions", I thought that we, at long last got an admission of guilt from our President. Sadly, no. This is rather an attempt to run down FDR by ressurecting the old right-wing charge that he "gave away the store" at Yalta.

"We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," the president said. "We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others."

Bush singled out the 1945 Yalta agreement signed by Roosevelt in a speech opening a four-day trip focused on Monday's celebration in Moscow of the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat.

Don't take my word for this being crap, take George Kennan's. He was actually involved in policymaking at the time, and, unlike Bush, he knew what he was talking about.

From AMERICAN DIPLOMACY:

"The most vociferous charges of wartime mistakes relate primarily to our dealings with the U.S.S.R., and particularly to the wartime conferences of Moscow, Teheran, and Yalta. As one who was very unhappy about thse conferences at the time they were taking place and very worried lest they lead to false hopes and misunderstandings, I may perhaps be permitted to say that I think their importance has recently been considerably overrated. If it cannot be said that the Western democracies gained very much from these talks with the Russians, it would also be incorrect to say that they gave very much away. The establishment of Soviet military power in eastern Europe and the entry of Soviet forces into Manchuria was not the result of these talks; it was the result of military operations during the concluding phases of the war. There was nothing the Western democracies could have done to prevent the Russians from entering these areas except to get there first, and this they were not in a position to do. The implication that Soviet forces would not have gone into Manchuria if Roosevelt had not arrived at the Yalta understanding with Stalin is surely nonsense. Nothing could have stopped the Russians from participating in the final phases of the Pacific war, in order to be in at the kill and to profit by an opportunity to gain objectives they had been seeking for half a century."

To win the Second World War, the Western Democracies needed the cooperation of the Soviet Union. Without Russian efforts in the East, Hitler might have been able to consolidate his gains in the west by devoting a larger portion of his forces to the occupation of France and the defeat of England, and we might have had to deal with Gaulieters for the next forty years. We could not expect Russian cooperation would come without a price, and that price involved the sphere of Soviet power expanding some distance to the west (how far depended on the contingencies of war). What would Bush have done? Short of declaring war and trying to drive the Russians out--at the cost of more lives and more misery for already war weary populations--there was nothing to be done. The Russians were going to leave eastern Europe about as fast as we left western Europe and there things stood.

Though Bush sneers at the value of stability, after six years of war and fifty million deaths, a sensible person should begin to see its charms. For all the pleasure Bush takes in the notion of democracy as a vast army on the march, he clearly understands nothing of the suffering, the sorrow, or the anguish of warfare. All he sees is the awesome power of advancing armies of freedom, bright and shiny in the sun. Dress him up in a fuzzy hat and pin a few medals on his chest, and he'd look very like a member of the Politburo, standing behind Stalin at the May Day parade, seeing in the faces of the Red Army troops a tantalizing glimpse of the New Soviet Man.

UPDATE: Nice to see that someone else noticed.