The Bigger Picture

Analysis of current events is a very tricky thing, and having read many, many, many books on history on subjects as diverse as World War Two, World War One, the American Civil War, and biographies of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Mao, Robespierre, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Khruschev, etc., one underlying theme has revealed itself time and again: things are not what they seem at the time that history is unfolding. A few examples:

-It is common perception that Hitler violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by invading the Soviet Union and betrayed his oath of non-aggression towards Stalin. As legend would have it, Stalin was placed into a state of catatonia for close to five days after the Nazi war machine had hurtled deep into Soviet territory, so shocked he was at this betrayal. This is only partially true. According to unearthed KGB archives that author Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin had every intention of thrusting westward to crush Hitler. Stalinists apologists in this country, peopled as they are in the academic cadres of our universities, have been peddling the "Stalin was a victim of betrayal" line for years. But the documents don't lie. In a document Radzinsky unearthed at the Historical/Military Archive of the USSR called "Reflections on a Plan forf the Strategic Deployment of the Armed forces of the Soviet Union in the Event of War with Germany and her Allies", a plan for an offensive was meticulously mapped out. Fifteen pages of the text discuss plans for a surprise attack on Germany.

Radzinsky's book was published in 1996. American academics had been teaching the lie of a peaceful USSR having been attacked by an aggressive Nazi war machine, in all likelihood, since the war itself. All Hitler did was beat Stalin to the punch, as Hitler got himself prepared for an offensive sooner than Stalin. (A sidenote: I was absolutely floored by this revelation in the Radzinsky book, and relayed my findings to my mother, who grew up in Europe during the war. Her response was even more surprising, when she said "EVERYONE in Europe knew that!")

-From 1943 on, Allied bombers flying from England, North Africa, then later Sicily and Italy (after Sicily and Italy had been taken) flew to Germany with the express goal of destroying the German military-industrial complex and its capacity to produce tanks, planes, guns, ball-bearings, etc. In May of 1945, after VE Day, the Allies had discovered that despite repeated bomber sorties and fighter plane strafings, the German industrial capacity was still operating at 80% of full capacity. German Armaments Minister Albert Speer had cleverly subdivided the factories into smaller, underground complexes, and thus, was able to maintain an unforseen (by the Allies) production resiliency. What the incessant bombing sorties DID accomplish was they burnt out the German Luftwaffe (airforce) staffs. So frequent were the bombing raids that the Germans lost all their best pilots over a two year period, leaving them with more than enough planes, but no one to fly them. Attempts at training fresh pilots were for naught because the skies were too dangerous most of the time, thus fresh pilots couldn't get enough air time to be effective.

-The Cuban Missle Crisis is generally thought of as a victory for Kennedy and a defeat for Khruschev. Psychologically this was true, but strategically the Soviets got the better of the deal. In return for removing intermediate-range missles from Cuba, Kennedy was forced to remove intermediate-range American missles from Turkey. He was also forced to give a committment not to attempt to invade Cuba again.

-Throughout the Cold War, liberals charged that there was an unnatural obsession amongst conservatives regarding communist infiltration in government, media, entertainment, and journalism. Alger Hiss, in particular, became the cause celebre of the liberals when he was named by the House of Un-American Activities as a Soviet spy. (Hiss, by the way, was the Undersecretary of State in the Roosevelt Administration and was a major player in the negotiation of the Yalta Agreement, an agreement that essentially sold all of central and eastern Europe to Stalin and condemned tens of thousands of Czech, Polish, Hungarian, etc. refugees to repatriation and death in Stalin's camps.) For decades, DECADES, liberals said that Hiss was the victim of a witch hunt, a great American slandered by the "fascist" right. And they kept it up until....the Venona files were opened up for public viewing. Venona, the code name for the secret program that J. Edgar Hoover started, was a secret group within the FBI that had cracked the Soviet codes and revealed many of the Soviet spies within government, entertainment, journalism, and the military. Hiss was revealed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, as a Soviet spy.

Now, consider this: Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying that he knew Whittaker Chambers, but not for spying. The Venona intercepts, now completely public, put to rest for all of history that Hiss was a spy, in 1997. The truth, as it really was, came to pass FIFTY SEVEN YEARS LATER.

Which brings me to my point:

Many on the left (all?) have claimed that the charge that Bush made to invade Iraq, the existence of WMDs, was deliberately bogus and designed to get us into a war with Iraq for the sole purpose of avenging Saddam's assassination attempt on "Daddy" (Bush's father). Pretty simplistic reasoning, I'd say, but whatever. But WMDs have not been found, so the casus belli for the war was not justified. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Sometimes history unfolds quickly, but most times, it takes years, perhaps decades, sometimes even centuries for the true nature of a historical event to actually reveal itself. It might be the case that Saddam had no WMDs. I doubt this contention profoundly, not because I have actual evidence that they existed, but a tremendous amount of anecdotal evidence. For instance, why all the oil-for-food bribes to all these significant people in the United Nations? Why the attempt to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger? (Yes, it did happen folks, Joe Wilson's prevarications notwithstanding; Wilson told one thing to the press, another to the Senate Intelligence Estimate, and the attempted buy was backed up by officials in Niger as well as Wilson himself. The false documents that the Italians provided were not the sole reason why the president used those fateful "18 words" in SOTU.) Why did the Clintonistas warble the same threats of WMDs throughout the 90's? Where did they go between the Bush and Clinton Administrations? Why did Italian, German, Israeli, Jordanian, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, and British Intelligence come to the same conclusions regarding the presence of WMDs as the CIA did? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that they were moved to either Iran or Syria? (He had plenty of time to move them!) And why is this such an impossible assumption for the anti-war lefties to make? And what of the Saddam terrorist links? We're only now getting around to translating those seized Iraqi documents, and they're showing MASSIVE support of jihadists. (Read Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard regarding that topic. You certainly won't see it on the front page of the New York Times.)

I'm taking the longview. There are too many unaswered questions on the whole Saddam/WMD connection for me to concede that it was an absolute fraud. If it took fifty seven years for proof of Alger Hiss's guilt to come to light, if it took fifty four years for Edvard Radzinsky to unearth a document that irrefutably proved that Stalin had every intention of attacking Hitler before Hitler attacked Stalin, and if it took over a decade for the truth to come out that Kennedy had actually strategically LOST the Cuban Missle Crisis face-off, I think I'll give it some time before the WMD question is settled. The study of history doesn't operate with a time expiration.