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Read History Much? Bush & Yalta

You might have heard our President recently took to historical revisionism, stating, U.S. Had Hand in European Divisions:

"We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," the president said. "We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others."

Bush singled out the 1945 Yalta agreement signed by Roosevelt in a speech opening a four-day trip focused on Monday's celebration in Moscow of the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat.

Bush said the Yalta agreement, also signed by Britain's Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, followed in the "unjust tradition" of other infamous war pacts that carved up the continent and left millions in oppression. The Yalta accord gave Stalin control of the whole of Eastern Europe, leading to criticism that Roosevelt had delivered millions of people to communist domination.

It is insane and dishonest to ignore large swaths of history and context to blame Churchill and FDR for "selling out Eastern Europe" to Stalin. The President's speech writers are very smart people, who are well versed at included code words in his speeches - just see the Dred Scott references during the 2004 Presidential election debates. So this is a signal to something, Kevin Drum posits (and I see no reason to disagree) that this hearkens back to McCarthy references and 1940's-1950's conservative language.

But I want to take the time to review the situation on the ground at January 1945, and the context of Yalta, in order to illustrate how wrong the President is, and how dangerous this line of reasoning is. Here is a timeline of the European Theatre for you to follow. It is also ignoring the situation on the ground, namely that the Soviet Union already controlled much of Eastern Europe on their charge to Berlin. By the middle of January 1945, the USSR had liberated Warsaw, Poland. By the end of January 1945 the Soviets had reached Auschwitz.

The Yalta Conference was 4 February - 11 February 1945. The Allies had not breached the Rhine yet, there was heavy fighting all along the western front, and the Pacific Campaign was deadly. It wouldn't be for another month, 16 April 1945, until the Soviets began their assault on Berlin. Germany was rapidly crumbling due to the two-front war, which Yalta solidified, but at the time, the war was hardly winnable.

As Kevin Drum reminds us:

Although it's true that FDR and Churchill essentially divvied up Europe with Stalin at the Yalta conference, they did it because they didn't have a choice: the Red Army already controlled most of Eastern Europe, and full scale war was the only thing that would have dislodged them. FDR and Churchill knew this and decided to acknowledge the obvious rather than start up yet another all-out war on an exhausted continent — a decision that probably would have been unpopular but acceptable if they had only fessed up to it instead of pretending no deal had been made. David Greenberg provides a more detailed history if you're interested.

But that was only in the European Theatre. Part of the negotiations at Yalta concerned having the Soviets declare war on Japan, which was desperately needed. Here's a timeline of Pacific Theatre events, a giant map, and an overview of battles for you to follow along with. By far, the best resource is from the documentary, Victory in the Pacific. What is also in play at Yalta, besides the reality on ground of the Soviet Union already owning everything east of Berlin, the war in the Pacific was shaping up to be magnitudes more costly than the European Campaign.

The US had invaded and taken Guam by the Yalta Conference; the "Island Hopping Campaign" was working, but at high cost to men and material. The US was planning and then invaded Iwo Jima on 19 February 1945, which would be one of the most bloody battles of the Pacific Campaign. LeMay's B-29s had not yet incinerated Tokyo - destroying 16 square miles of Tokyo, killing more than 83,000, along with a large portion of Tokyo's industrial capacity. Already, plans for the invasion of mainland Japan were being drawn up, and the estimated casualties for invading Japan at 280,000.

The Japanese ignored the Potsdam Conference (26 July 1945), calling for Japan's surrender, until 9 August - after the Soviet Union invaded Japanese-held Manchuria. This was two days after the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Only after the second atomic bomb on 9 August on Nagasaki, and after the Soviets had invaded, did Japan begin to seriously consider unconditional surrender. World War Two would not have ended if the Soviets did not enter the war, partly due to the Japanese fear of the Soviets. Japan and the then Russia had been antagonists for quite some time prior to World War Two, with Japan defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

But this history lesson only adds to the level of outrage we should be heaping on anyone who claims that we should have just invaded the Soviet Union and "freed Eastern Europe" in 1945. Ignoring that Japan (due to their Russia-fixation) would not have surrenedered without Soviet invervention, like the editors of NRO do, is just ignoring history. Because this faulty historical ignorance gives way to this, from Jonah Goldberg:

In Leftism (an organizationally chaotic but excellent book) [Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn] speculated in a fairly throw-away fashion that the clamor to "bring the boys home" after the war was so widespread and well orchestrated that it might have been directed from Moscow so that the fait of the Soviet occupation could remain accompli as it were.

Has anyone ever addressed this question head on?

Which, as Yglesias points out, is utter crap. If you are going to accuse people of treason, why don't you have the intellectual honesty to do that?