Buchanan, Bush, and Yalta

I don't subscribe to the paleo-conservative ideology of Pat Buchanan, but it is awfully hard to claim that the man doesn't have an impeccable sense of history. He is provocative and insightful, and in his latest column on the Yalta Agreement and its impact on history, he had this to say:

If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain refused. In 1939, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Poland. Chamberlain agreed. At the end of the war Churchill wanted and got, Czechoslovakia and Poland were in Stalin's empire.

How, then, can men proclaim Churchill "Man of the Century"?

I'm a big Churchill fan, so I can answer this question very simply: by the end of WWII, Great Britain was virtually bankrupt, and was in no condition to bargain or barter. Additionally, only a quarter of the land forces in Western Europe were British or Canadian; the Americans made up the bulk of the fighting force. Clearly then, the sell-out (and ultimate responsibility) of Eastern and Central Europe rests squarely on Roosevelt's shoulders. (And I'm a Roosevelt fan as well.) Such is what happens when the forces of freedom do not stand up to tyranny. Roosevelt had the strong hand against Stalin, but due to misinformation, or more aptly termed disinformation (conveyed to him in no small manner by convicted Soviet spy and Undersecretary of State Alger Hiss), Roosevent gave Stalin free reign in Central and Eastern Europe, naively believing that Stalin would allow democratic elections in those eleven republics. It wasn't until 1989 that the Berlin Wall, and subsequently the entire bloc, crumbled....hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of deaths later. But Buchanan raises an interesting point. Why would Great Britain and France go to war on behalf of Poland in 1939, only to turn around a scant six years later and hand it over to an even more lethal viper in the person of Stalin? Buchanan is right to ask this question, and if this was the goal all along, why bother fighting the war to begin with?

The Yalta Agreement has been revisited recently as a result of President Bush's apology to the formerly Eastern Bloc states whilst in Riga, Latvia. Roosevelt defenders (read: lefties) like Joe Conason have gone nuts over Bush's apology and claim that the President was out of line. I fail to see how. This is what the President Vike-Freiberga of Latvia had to say:

On May the 8th, Latvia will join Europe in celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. However, unlike the case in Western Europe, the fall of the hated Nazi German empire did not result in my country's liberation. Instead, the three Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were subject to another brutal occupation by another foreign, totalitarian empire, that of the Soviet Union.

This is what Bush said a few days after in Riga:

As we mark a victory of six days ago -- six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox. 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. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

Tough stuff, but if Bush was wrong, how does one jive his wrong-headedness with the comments made made by the Latvian president?

60 years after the fact, the controversial Yalta Agreement has been re-opened for examination. Putin isn't happy, nor are American liberals. But the fact that Roosevelt agreed to let Stalin take over all of Central and Eastern Europe, not to mention the Japanese Sakhalin Islands, with nary a complaint or an objection, has to counted against the man historically. Subjecting tens of millions of people to Stalinist tyranny after liberating them (in part) from Hitlerite tyranny cannot be considered a positive part of the Roosevelt legacy.