New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | May 10, 2005

As President Bush runs a former Soviet victory lap, Matt Welch daintily throws a rose at the champ.

Comments

|5.10.05 @ 5:10PM|#

Is Matt's rose why Bush is dancing?

http://www.dancingbush.com/

|5.10.05 @ 7:55PM|#

he has stood firmly on the side of liberal reformers most everywhere they have appeared along Russia's borders. (Uzbekistan, which played a key role in the Afghan War, is a notable exception.)

As is Tajikistan. And Azerbijan. And to a lesser degree, Turkmenistan.

Bush's record of supporting democracy in former Soviet republics could definitely be much worse. But there's more than one situation in which he's been willing to cozy up to a dictator in the name of furthering energy interests and/or combatting Islamist terrorism.

|5.10.05 @ 10:43PM|#

But there's more than one situation in which he's been willing to cozy up to a dictator in the name of furthering energy interests and/or combatting Islamist terrorism.

Add Mushareef's Pakistan to the list - apparently, dictators can even sponsor Islamic terrorists as long as the ones they sponsor are only used against India in Kashmir. Mushareef has been very diligent in going after the "right" terrorists (i.e. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban) while pretending that Azad Kashmir doesn't exist, and the Bush Administration seems perfectly content to play along.

|5.11.05 @ 3:52AM|#

Saudi Arabia, anyone? Has the Prez been putting the screws on their monarchy to embrace democratic reforms... or hell, just to quit chopping off the hands of shoplifters?

|5.11.05 @ 10:09AM|#

I'm not going to single out Yalta as a high point of American diplomacy, but the myth has outgrown the reality. A couple of salient points:

1. There were several million Red Army troops occupying every country that became part of the Soviet empire. FDR didn't give Stalin anything - Stalin took it. Why do the people who constantly belittle diplomacy think that FDR could have undone the military reality with a piece of paper?

2. The agreement signed at Yalta committed Stalin to respect the independence of Eastern European countries, and allow them to choose their governments through a democratic process. The language was so pro-democracy that Molotov urged Stalin not to sign it. In order to bring down the Iron Curtain, Stalin had to violate the treaty.

3. The atomic bomb was still the fantasy of a few physicists when the treaty was signed, and the invasion of the Japanese home islands was on the drawing board. Operation Olympic was expected to cost the US 1,000,000 casualties. Signing a treaty was necessary to secure the Soviets' aid in the Pacific War.

Matt Welch|5.11.05 @ 1:25PM|#

joe -- The Red Army wasn't occupying the Czech Republic in February 1945. Also, I'm amazed that people are interpreting this as an attack on FDR, when A) FDR wasn't named at all, B) it was clearly offered in the context of Great Powers deciding the fates of small countries. Bush was saying that that's a bad thing; I think it is possible to maintain the simultaneous belief that it was bad & also very difficult to avoid. I see zero harm in telling the Baltic countries -- whose erasure was swallowed at Yalta -- that we consider such an approach a mistake not worth repeating.