He loved the power. Perhaps because he was a disabled, wheelchair-bound polio victim, he liked the power even more.
Posted on 05/15/2005 10:35:41 AM PDT by lizol
White House Letter: In row over Yalta, Bush pokes at Baltic politics.
WASHINGTON When President George W. Bush declared on May 7 in Latvia that the 1945 Yalta agreement had led to "one of the greatest wrongs of history," he reignited an ideological debate from the era of Joseph McCarthy. For more than a week now, the left and the right have been arguing over the president's words and re-arguing the deal made by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill in an old czarist resort near the Crimean city of Yalta in the closing days of World War II.
Bush has criticized Yalta at least six other times publicly, usually in Eastern Europe, but never so harshly. In the dust kicked up by all the quarreling, the central question for White House watchers is this: How did the unexpected attack on Yalta get in the president's speech? What drove his thinking? Did the White House expect the fallout?
First, the history and the debate.
Yalta effectively recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and set the stage for what later became known as the cold war.
In the view of many conservatives, the dying Roosevelt did nothing less at Yalta than sell out Eastern Europe to Soviet control for the next 50 years. In the view of liberals, including major historians, Roosevelt ceded Poland and parts of Eastern Europe to Stalin because the Red Army controlled the territory anyway, and Yalta changed no realities on the ground. Yalta also called for free elections in Poland, a call that Stalin later ignored.
Not only did Bush side with the conservatives in his speech in the Latvian capital, Riga, he also took a harder-line view against Yalta than any other American president, including Ronald Reagan.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
He loved the power. Perhaps because he was a disabled, wheelchair-bound polio victim, he liked the power even more.
At the end of WWII it was not the Communists who beat the Nazis but the Russians who beat the Germans. It was the armies of mother Russia who stood on the line dividing east from west, who'd lost 25 million dead to get there. They weren't going to give an inch to anyone...and certainly not to Westerners who they suspected - with good reason - stood by while they suffered and jumped in at the end and grabbed as much as they could.
Sure, Roosevelt could have refused to confirm legitimacy, refused to recognize their conquests. A lot of good that would have done.
Roosevelt led us thru the great Depression and WWII into a world which we dominated like no nation had before. If this is how you measure incompetence give me more...and don't give me any of that coulda, woulda, shoulda. He did it while his critics made only noise.
What the heck, underage conscripts were cheap then, and Stalin went on to kill another 20 million Russians.
They didn't conquer the east anymore than we conquered the west.
The misleading claim that the Baltics were ceded to the USSR before Yalta ignores the earlier disagreement between Roosevelt and Churchill about the Baltics.
Before officially ending the War, Churchill wanted to prolong the war 6 months in order to roust Russia from the Baltics. This would have meant that troops would move at least from Poland to Greece in a liberating march. Roosevelt strongly opposed Churchill. He said that the US citizenry would not tolerate 6 more months of war.
In fact there was no question of war or of spilling blood. By a grand victory march to the Mediterranian the Western Allies would have established the overthrow of the Third Reich in the Baltics and enforced national boundaries. Russia could not have opposed this move militarily. However, just as in East Germany, Stalin strongly objected to the Allied liberation of the Baltics based on Russia's geopolitical interests.
In fact the US citizenry was chomping at the bit to free the Baltics in a grand victory parade of freedom and democracy. Many Americans hailed from these countries and had strong feelings against Russian occupation. The American people understood that the war was about freedom from opression.
I remember my German and British grandparents were depressed for years over America's failure to liberate these nations so sorely opressed by Hitler. There was a great sense of betrayal here in the US over the failure of the Allies to liberate those nations for whom we went to war.
The left has a deeply rooted vested interest in rewriting history. Their primary impetus seems always to soften criticism of Marxist states and make Utopian claims about socialism. The left equivocates in the face of ghastly realities of mass murder and all forms of vicious opression by Marxist tyrants. ("They have not tried pure Communism MY way," remains the idiotic rejoinder.)
Roosevelt's chief negotiator, Alger Hiss, was a Russian plant, a communist and a traitor. That traitor manipulated Roosevelt into supporting 50 years of tyranny in the Baltics.
Roosevelt was, after all, a dying, weak president with no heart left for shedding American blood. That may be the most positive rationale for this remarkable and shocking act of cowardice.
And put hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps and tried to stack the courts unconstitutionally.
It took WWII to pull everyone out of the Depression...just like it took the Black Death to pull Europe out of an earlier funk. Something sobering to think about...but in any case we did better than most during those tough times thanks to Roosevelt.
A weak person would crave stength? Crazy theory. Why, if that were the case, then someone with severe neuro-muscular disease would end up the leading theorist in cosmology!
What? Who?
Oh, never mind.
Plus the thousands of Russian soldiers Ike "repatriated" to stalin at the end of the war, to their deaths. Russian soldiers who fought for Mother Russia, but knew the evil stalin and did not want to go back. "Operation Keelhaul".
FMCDH(BITS)
Yep, he did those things. The first with the help - no the insistance - of very large numbers of conservatives and Republicans. And the second because those same groups tried to resist everything he did in a critical time.
Tough times call for tough measures. It's hard to say he was wrong when things turned out so well.
Roosevelt [administration] is not critized for that period of time but for setting in motion the ascendancy of world international communism in Eastern Europe and the Far East. We have had two wars since against communist nations plus Cuba and NK. Communist China and Russia remain formidable enemies. Dictatorships were Roosevelt's legacy which I believe Bush was rightly pointing out.
Sort of like the Patriot Act with Democrats, except that the Patriot Act is within the constraints of the Constitution.
And the second because those same groups tried to resist everything he did in a critical time.
A lot like the "Byrd option" to be used this week in the U.S. Senate, though certainly not as unconstitutional to what FDR was trying to do
Tough times call for tough measures. It's hard to say he was wrong when things turned out so well.
A lesson your party should adhere to nowadays.
As to the particulars;
Is this the Churchill who earlier made a hellish bargain with Stalin involving Greece?
A grand victory march to the Baltics? You're the master strategist are you?
U.S. citizens chomping at the bit to fight on and free the Baltics because many of them hailed from there? What percentage of Americans are of Baltic ancestry? I can tell you that noone I knew felt that way.
Your granparents felt betrayed? Well, my parents didn't even though we lost relatives in the concentration camps that Roosevelt failed to liberate earlier. He did the best he could...and that was damned good.
Please not those old saws about Roosevelt and the Left. Roosevelt had plenty of anti-semites and outright German sympathizers yelling in his ear as well. The man was no fool. He knew who the Communists were, who the Nazis were, where people stood. He was born in the 1880 to a political family. He remembered WWI and the Revolutions which followed. He was President while the Communists and Nazis fought it out on the streets of Europe. He was noone's dupe . He did what he did because he believed it was the best that could be done. As a politician he had no equal and as a President his record will stand with anyone's.
As to the particulars;
Is this the Churchill who earlier made a hellish bargain with Stalin involving Greece?
A grand victory march to the Baltics? You're the master strategist are you?
U.S. citizens chomping at the bit to fight on and free the Baltics because many of them hailed from there? What percentage of Americans are of Baltic ancestry? I can tell you that noone I knew felt that way.
Your granparents felt betrayed? Well, my parents didn't even though we lost relatives in the concentration camps that Roosevelt failed to liberate earlier. He did the best he could...and that was damned good.
Please not those old saws about Roosevelt and the Left. Roosevelt had plenty of anti-semites and outright German sympathizers yelling in his ear as well. The man was no fool. He knew who the Communists were, who the Nazis were, where people stood. He was born in the 1880 to a political family. He remembered WWI and the Revolutions which followed. He was President while the Communists and Nazis fought it out on the streets of Europe. He was noone's dupe . He did what he did because he believed it was the best that could be done. As a politician he had no equal and as a President his record will stand with anyone's.
It's not my party because they don't. I voted for Bush exactly for this reason. If I have to choose between Bush and Bin Laden, between Republicans and Ayatollahs, it's a no-brainer. Many on the Left, I'm very sad to note, cannot say the same.
What other options did we have? Its easy for bush to say 60years later we should of done something for some cheap political gain.
The Soviets had control of all eastern europe and was about to control most of Germany. They had a 5.7 million man army there. They would would have left if FDR said so? Six months of more war is very funny, more like 6 years and alot more than the 400k of American war dead for sure.
We still had Japan to worry about. Even if we could mass produce A-bombs not really sure how that would make us better in the end than the soviets.
The 77th Congress (1941-1943) has 66 Democrats and 28 Republicans in the senate with 2 independents; in the house, there 267 Democrats and 162 Republicans with 6 independents.
Whatever pressure the Republicans were exerting on FDR couldn't be that much.
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