Here are the money quotes for those incapable of reading the entire article:
That the commemoration of the end of World War II is being used to announce the commencement of World War IV is just another one of those little ironies that the Bush administration seems to delight in.
By entering the war at all, and opening up a “second front” in the West ? at the urging of American leftists and other friends of the Soviet Union ? the U.S. saved the Bolsheviks from probable extinction at Hitler’s hands. Without American support via the Lend-Lease Act, the Soviet regime might not have survived the war ? which was precisely the hope of those conservative opponents of U.S. intervention, supporters of the America First Committee such as Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the staunchly anti-interventionist Chicago Tribune.
McCormick was right. By the time Roosevelt met with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, in mid-February of 1945, it was too late to reverse the effects of our entry into the war: the enslavement of Eastern Europe by the Kremlin was an accomplished fact. As the three leaders sat down to plan the postwar world, Soviet troops were already ensconced in Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn. A few months later, they would “liberate” Prague and Vienna. At Yalta, the American president merely acknowledged the facts on the ground: when the Red Army raised its flag over the bombed-out ruins of the German Reichstag, the Bolshevist banner was hoisted over half of Europe. No other result could have been imagined.
If Bush really wanted to repent for a U.S. policy that essentially created the postwar Soviet empire, he would have commemorated the end of World War II by forthrightly ruing the day we got into it.
[i]Bush disingenuously declared:
“All the nations that border Russia will benefit from the spread of democratic values, and so will Russia itself. Stable, prosperous democracies are good neighbors, trading in freedom and posing no threat to anyone.”
If that’s true, then why is Ukraine clamoring to enter NATO ? or, better yet, why is NATO still in existence over a decade after the demise of Communism? If the prospect of NATO troops stationed minutes from Moscow is “no threat to anyone,” then one has to wonder when Putin is supposed to start worrying. Presumably, when they reach the gates of the Kremlin.[/i]
All indications are that America’s fifth column inside the former Soviet Union is mobilizing for a mighty push to prevent Putin from running for a third term.
Imagine if the Russian foreign minister had arrived on our shores in the late 1930s and denounced the very idea of Roosevelt running for a third term as evidence that America was veering off the path of democracy. What a sensation it would have caused! We don’t have to imagine what would happen if an American secretary of state traveled to Russia and said exactly the equivalent about Putin’s ambitions, because Condoleezza Rice has done it ? alienating the Russian people, as well as their popular leader, who had no choice but to answer in kind.
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Putin wondered why America goes abroad in search of undemocratic monsters to destroy when the dragon of elitist rule survives in the Electoral College. He reminded Americans that Bush came to power thanks to the Supreme Court, rather than a majority vote of the electorate. He noted Russia is criticized for appointing rather than electing regional governors, but India has a similar system ? yet no one is diagnosing New Delhi’s healthy democracy as afflicted with terminal authoritarianism.
What color will the anti-Putin “revolutionaries” choose as their chromatic theme? Red is out, of course, and orange, yellow, pink, and rose are already taken.
The last leg of Bush’s journey is surely the most ominous. Georgia sits amid the smoldering cinders of a low-level brush fire that could well flare up, on any pretext, into a more generalized conflagration: the Caucasus is the Balkans of the 21st century, where a single spark could set off World War IV.
[i]Georgia’s “revolutionary” pro-Western regime ? put in power by the U.S. and maintained by massive amounts of “foreign aid” ? has restricted freedom of assembly, cracked down on opposition groups, and engaged in arbitrary arrests and detentions. The “pro-democracy” activists of the “Rose Revolution,” once in power, launched what amounts to a massive purge of former officials and Schevardnadze-era business moguls. Victims of the “revolution” are blackmailed, hauled before a kangaroo court, imprisoned, and brutally mistreated ? that’s according to our own State Department country report on human rights practices in Georgia.
If George W. Bush scolds Putin for an alleged “authoritarian” streak, then what will he say to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili? He led a “Rose Revolution” fueled, in large part, by the claim that the Shevardnadze party had rigged the 2003 parliamentary elections ? and he was elected president in 2004 with a disquieting 96 percent of the vote, an achievement second only to the results of Saddam Hussein’s 2002 “referendum,” in which he claimed 100 percent assent for another seven-year term.
You can count on Bush not mentioning any of the above in Tbilisi, but instead pointing to Saakashvili as a model leader of Georgia’s “aspiring” democracy. As a prospective NATO member, Georgia is on the front lines of the new anti-Russian alliance: along with Ukraine and the Baltics, it is slated to become an important forward base for the West.[/i]
The Caucasus rumbles with seismic tremors, as the tectonic plates of power shift. In newly “liberated” Kyrgyzstan, the pink-and-yellow “revolutionaries” are seizing the property of Russian speakers and effectively carrying out an anti-Russian ethnic cleansing. Moldova smolders, while the Americans openly incite the Belarusians to rise. Oh, but we aren’t Jacobins, protests the president…
That Moscow now finds itself in a circle of steel, surrounded by enemies armed and brought to power by the West, should disabuse Putin of any notion that he can successfully appease the West and avoid being targeted as the latest “dictator” to fall. They will come for him, or they will come for his successor. They are already on the way.
Putin, the quintessential patriot, is standing up for Holy Mother Russia, and he is far from the authoritarian monster that Western liberals have conjured. He is, however, (a) no angel, and (b) burdened by major economic problems.
[i]What is important to keep in mind, as the demonization of Russia proceeds apace, is that Russia is no threat to the United States at present, and it is not in our interests to institute a policy of “regime change” in that country, either by funding “pro-democracy” movements and institutions or by other means.
Russia is barely a decade out of the worst tyranny the world has ever seen, and the progress it has made in the direction of individual liberty, the democratic process, and the rule of law is remarkable by any measure.
[/i]
Our policy toward Russia brings out the underlying theme of American foreign policy, which is not Democracy but Domination ? American domination, that is. In the endless search for enemies that keeps the interventionists perpetually busy, it is Russia’s turn, once again, to play the bogeyman. We can only hope that the Fourth World War, like the Third, will remain a cold war.
Can’t wait to hear all the educated opinions about this one!
P.S. Be sure to click on all the red words and phrases in the article before voicing a disagreement.