Free Republic

Saying sorry By Anne Applebaum "It just offends me that the president of the United States is, directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land." That was 1998. The speaker, Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), was then House majority whip. The president was Bill Clinton, who had "attacked his own country" while in Uganda. "Going back to the time before we were even a nation," Clinton had told an African audience, "European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that." Fast-forward seven years; the president is now George W. Bush. Last weekend he...

Bush's Diplomatic MasterstrokeApplause Lines by Jacob T. Levy Only at TNR Online Post date: 05.13.05 President Bush's first term was not marked by an overeagerness to confront Russia, either on its failings at home or on its foreign policy. Especially after September 11, Bush turned a blind eye to Chechnya, Russian meddling (including armed meddling) in other former Soviet republics, corruption, violations of the rule of law, and the slow-motion destruction of the (partial) independence of Russia's press, courts, parliament, and provinces. Bush curried favor with Vladimir Putin--just as Bill Clinton had curried favor with Boris Yeltsin and Bush's...

During his recent trip to Europe commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Allies' victory over Nazi Germany, President Bush gave Russian President Vladimir Putin a healthy dose of reality. Speaking in Riga, Latvia, before meeting with Putin, Bush said, "For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. ... The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe...

Bushspeak in Europe It was a great weekend for major-power politics. The debate was quickly framed as follows: Did President Bush, by his remarks, contribute to the stability of democracy, or did he enhance the prospects of destabilization in Russia? That criticism is serious and attracts immediate concern. A reductionist formulation of the criticism would remind us that territorial Russia stretches across eleven time zones and that however bedraggled the Russian military is at this point, Russia is still the second largest nuclear power in the world — by some reckonings, the premier nuclear power, since the old, wicked USSR...

PILSEN, Czech Republic (Army News Service, May 12, 2005) -- It was early in the morning, and most of the townspeople were still in their homes when they heard the sound. It was the sound of metal rolling against metal, chewing up the ground and rumbling toward them like a small earthquake. The people crept out of their homes, and when they learned the ruckus was the sound of V Corps tanks advancing, they came to believe the rolling thunder was the greatest sound they had ever heard – the sound of liberation. On May 6, 1945, in the closing...

As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives. Indeed, most recent op-eds commemorating V-E day either blamed the United States for Hamburg or for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, or for our supposed failure to credit the Russians for their sacrifices. It is true that the...

Moscow was the last place President Bush should have gone to mark the 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Russian soldiers goose-stepping through Red Square, dignitaries assembled in front of Lenin's tomb, the strains of the Soviet anthem introduced by Stalin in 1944 — this was not a scene that the leader of the free world had any business being a part of

Thank you, President Bush, for correcting history and making a long overdue apology for one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tragic mistakes. Speaking in Latvia on May 7, Bush repudiated “the agreement at Yalta” by which powerful governments negotiated away the freedom of small nations. Bush accurately blamed Yalta for “the captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe” and said it “will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.” This admission has been 50 years coming, and Bush’s words assure that “the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and for all.” It was at Yalta,...

President Bush struck a nerve during his recent trip to Europe when he acknowledged America's role in the communist enslavement of Eastern Europe after World War II. In a speech in Latvia, he said the United States and Britain share the blame for the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states through the 1945 Yalta Conference treaty -- the crown jewel of liberal diplomacy -- and urged Russian Premier Vladimir Putin to own up to the Soviet Union's dark past. Weary of war, worried about their popularity at home and wanting Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's aid in defeating Japan after Germany's...

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia Russia's Federal Security service said Thursday it foiled planned terror attacks ahead of Victory in Europe celebrations, discovering a truck packed with more than a ton of explosives and a cache of poisons allegedly intended for chemical attacks. The truck was found near the Chechen capital of Grozny, said Maj. Gen. Ilya Shabalkin, chief spokesman for the federal forces in the North Caucasus region. Its frame and chassis were outfitted with about 2,600 pounds of explosives for an attack allegedly planned by Chechen rebel leaders Shamil Basayev, Doku Umarov and Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev _ the successor to slain rebel...

US President George W. Bush declared today "Russia is not an enemy, Russia is our friend", a day after returning from a sometimes tense visit over US calls for democratic reforms in the region of the former Soviet Union. Mr Bush returned yesterday from a trip to Russia, Latvia, Georgia and the Netherlands holding out the Baltic states as an example of democracy for Russia. "Sitting in Red Square honouring the veterans of World War II was an amazing event. I remember as a kid watching the missiles parade through Red Square - and here I sat as the president...

Fifty-two years after his death, Soviet leader Josef Stalin still has a special place in the heart of many Russians. The 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany this week has once again brought questions about his legacy to the forefront. Stalin has long entered Western history books as a ruthless dictator. But in Russia, observers and opinions polls are suggesting that the man who ruled the Soviet Union for almost 30 years and was responsible for millions of deaths is back in favor. Moscow, 12 May 2005 (RFE/RL) – Like many pensioners in Russia, 63-year-old Maria Vinokurova...

On a reviewing stand next to Lenin's tomb, President Bush watched as goose-stepping Russian soldiers paraded by with their hammer and sickle flags. It was a surreal moment. The threat of Communism was for many decades the defining geopolitical reality of our times. The Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the gulags, show trials, re-education camps, the specter of nuclear annihilation, duck and cover drills at school and bomb shelters were all part of it. So were our military struggles in Korea and Vietnam, in which we lost more than 54,000 and 58,000 U.S. soldiers, respectively. Communism would bury us, the...

Five days after D-Day, Winston Churchill got this message from Stalin: "My colleagues and I cannot but admit that the history of warfare knows no other like undertaking from the point of view of its scale, its vast conception, and its masterly execution …. History will record this deed as an achievement of the highest order." Now President George W. Bush has gone to Moscow, on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, to pay tribute to the Soviet Union’s achievement in defeating Hitler. At the same time, in very Bush-like fashion, he has been ruffling...

happy warrior MARK STEYN A War Without Polkas Is Western civilization up for the battle? A week and a half after the VE Day anniversary, here’s a date that will get a lot less attention: May 19, 2005. On that day, the War on Terror will have outlasted America’s participation in the Second World War. In other words, the period since 9/11 will be longer than the period of time between Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Does it seem that long? For the most part, no. The War on Terror has involved no...

Pat Buchanan artice as posted on Free Republic: What Exactly Is Bush Celebrating in Moscow?What does Pat Buchanan think? Posted by: Dale Franks on Monday, May 09, 2005 I've often wondered what Pat Buchanan thinks. More, precisely, I've wondered how he thinks. How does he come to his conclusions? Today, in an odd little article, he's got me wondering again. Mr. Buchanan, it seems, is peeved. That's not unusual for a man who's primarily known for peevishness, but I'm a little confused about why he's peeved about the President Celebrating V-E Day in Moscow. Or perhaps "peeved" is the wrong...

For many older Czechs, it was hard to stomach the pomp and circumstance of Russia's commemorations of the end of World War II May 9. Russia lost more than 20 million of its citizens to the war — more than any other country — and through its bravery it also saved the world from Nazism. This sentiment put forth by Russian President Vladimir Putin is hard to argue with. But since Stalin's victims, over time, far outnumbered Hitler's, and since the Soviet Union conducted a tyrannical campaign to control half of Europe for more than four decades, it would be...

Goose-stepping soldiers. Hammers and sickles. That was some spectacle in Red Square to commemorate the 60th anniversary of V-E Day... The history airbrushed out of this week's celebrations includes the Soviet role in the rise of Germany. In the 1920s, the Soviets aided Germany's illegal rearmament, helping to develop the tanks and warplanes later used against them. In 1939, Stalin concluded a nonaggression pact that allowed Adolf Hitler to launch his blitzkrieg against Poland, France and the Low Countries. Stalin's share in the spoils was the Baltic states, Finland and parts of Poland and Romania. For the next two years,...

Forward to VE Day Our memory wars will never end, but a common future is possible Timothy Garton Ash in Warsaw Thursday May 12, 2005 The Guardian After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, it's clear that the peoples of Europe have a shared past, but not a common one. Sixty years on, the memory of war here in Warsaw is still irreconcilable with that in Moscow. But it's also utterly different from London's low-key festival of "We'll meet again" nostalgia. Only in the recollections of...

It was in the 1980s when the first letters arrived at the Izvestia office, bubbling up from the openness that had just started under perestroika, as the country began to re-examine its past. The letters came from soldiers who felt betrayed by their country when they were left to fight without weapons at the start of the war, from relatives who were stigmatized for decades because their sons were labeled "missing in action," from prisoners scorned and punished for having been in concentration camps. "I Saw It" (Ya Eto Videl) is a collection of excerpts from the thousands of such...