BUT FOR YALTA WE'D BE GOING TO SLEEP BY THE LIGHT OF A COMMIE MOON:

Soviet concessions at Yalta (GREGORY CLARK, 5/19/05, Japan Times)

U.S. President George W. Bush rained heavily on Russian President Vladimir Putin's 60th anniversary war-end parade when he said the United States had renounced the Yalta agreement that conceded to Moscow postwar control over Eastern Europe. Putin had every right to be annoyed.

Yalta was in February 1945, and Bush was born in June 1946. So he probably found it hard to realize that Yalta simply recognized a reality at the time -- namely that Moscow already controlled East Europe. And how about Moscow's many concessions at Yalta? Can they be revoked, too?

If not for those concessions, a slew of other territories -- Greece, Turkey, Iran, Manchuria, Finland, Berlin, much more of Germany, Austria, all of the Korean Peninsula, and even northern Hokkaido -- could have ended up under full or partial Soviet control.

Why stop there? Such fantasies are so dependent on the sudden ubercompetence of a USSR which had augured Russia into the ground and proceeded to blight all of Eastern Europe that you may as well just keep expanding the imaginary Empire.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2005 8:08 PM