U.S. is targeting the Mideast, not Russia

JWR ^ | 5-13-05 | James P. Pinkerton

[FlyLow]

The United States has a strategy of encircling Russia, and it's working.

But the real target of that strategy is beyond Russia — or, more precisely, south of Russia, all the way down to the Middle East.

President George W. Bush's trip to Europe illustrates his ideological, as well as geopolitical, ambitions. When he visited Latvia last week, the president cheered conservatives here by denouncing the 1945 Yalta agreement, in which the U.S. recognized the capitalist-communist partition of post-World War II Europe.

For the most part, to be sure, Franklin D. Roosevelt was simply acknowledging reality at the time of Yalta; the Red Army already controlled most of Eastern Europe. What was the alternative? Another war? But the right, of course, denounced Yalta as a "sellout."

Today, Yalta is a dead letter; the 1945 deal came crashing down along with the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union itself. The former "captive nations" of Eastern Europe are now free. So for Bush to bring up the Yalta agreement yet again on May 7 — he denounced it as "unjust" and even equated it to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact that triggered World War II — is a clear sign of his determination to cement his standing with conservatives in the United States as well as ex-Soviet peoples abroad.

Bush also traveled to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, another new country on the border of Russia, to deliver yet another paean to democracy. To small "d" democrats everywhere, they were moving words.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

BTTT.

[jokar]

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