Reagan Vindicated (As If There Was Any Doubt At This Point)

Truth Out of Poland

New York Sun Staff Editorial
November 29, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/23684

When President Reagan described the Soviet Union in 1983 as "an evil empire," he was widely denounced as a warmonger. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose bestselling history of the 20th century, "Age of Extremes," has become a standard text on many campuses, reckoned that in the "Second Cold War" that began in 1979 when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, American democracy was "more dangerous" than Soviet totalitarianism. "The hysteria in Washington was not, of course, based on realistic reasoning.... There was absolutely no evidence, or likelihood, that the USSR wanted a war...let alone that it was planning a military attack on the West. The feverish scenarios of nuclear attack which came from the mobilized Western cold warriors and government publicity in the early 1980s were self-generated," he wrote. Historians of the 21st century, he predicted, "remote from the living memories of the 1970s and 1980s, will puzzle over the apparent insanity of this outburst of military fever...."

Well, the 21st century is here and it turns out that it is not the Cold Warriors but the "peace movement" that in retrospect looks insane. That is the meaning of the the Warsaw Pact map of Europe covered in nuclear mushroom symbols that was disclosed last week by the new Polish defense minister, Radek Sikorski, and reproduced on our foreign page yesterday. Mr. Sikorski is the Polish patriot who has made it his mission to teach his countrymen the truth about communism. He was recently based at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., until he was elected to the Polish Senate and joined the new government as head of the armed forces. Historians who, unlike Mr. Hobsbawm, do not have a record of lifelong support for communism now have a duty to examine the evidence that is emerging.

Mr. Sikorski's recent press conference, our Daniel Johnson wrote us from London, marked the first time that the Warsaw Pact archives have been opened for public scrutiny. Mr. Sikorski unveiled a battle plan dating from 1979. The Soviet led alliance was then poised for a massive tactical nuclear strike against forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, paving the way for the occupation of Western Europe. Much of Germany, Denmark, and Belgium would have been obliterated, including hundreds of thousands of American military and civilian personnel. This scenario was based on the assumption that NATO would retaliate with its own tactical nuclear weapons against a line of targets in Poland along the Vistula. The Kremlin was cynical enough to expect its Polish ally to launch an unprovoked offensive against the West in the full knowledge that millions of Polish civilians would be sacrificed.

It turns out that many of those who are today's leading European anti-Americans were the same individuals who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, demanded unilateral nuclear disarmament. It is now clear that the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles by NATO, bitterly opposed by the so-called peace movement, was decisive in deterring a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Yet not only communists and fellow travelers but leftists on both sides of the Atlantic insisted throughout that America, not the Soviet Union, was the greater threat to world peace, especially once the Reagan administration halted the period of decline that followed the Vietnam War. Wouldn't it be something to have been a fly on the wall when President Putin, the erstwhile KGB colonel who is now leading Russia, clicked on his television to watch Mr. Sikorski, who spent the years of Soviet-imposed martial law in Poland in exile?

The editors of these columns have long been for an Eastern European lustration. But the historical record will be a good start, particularly if other other governments of former Warsaw Pact countries will have the courage to follow Poland's lead and throw open their archives, too. They should ignore not only the Kremlin, but also the hypocritical complaints of those who say that old wounds are being reopened. For these disclosures - and there will be more, once historians have sifted through the documents - have vital lessons for the present. Once again, America is being depicted as an aggressor for standing up to a tyranny that thinks nothing of genocide. Once again, Europe is in danger of losing its nerve. Once again, an administration that refuses to appease the foe is accused of hysteria. Only this time the enemy is not communist but Islamist. The threat that an "Islamic bomb" will be developed and used, either by Iranian mullahs or by terrorists, is real and imminent. It is good that President Bush and veterans of the Cold War, such as Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, are in a position to ensure that these lessons are learned, not forgotten.