Posted on 03/06/2003 10:40:22 PM PST by kattracks
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:01:19 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Fifty years ago this month in Moscow, Josef Stalin died. He and his Red Army had been our allies (not formally but informally) in defeating Nazism and Fascism. Winston Churchill thought well of "old Joe" for a time. During the war American propaganda referred to his armies as "Our Heroic Soviet Allies," and President Roosevelt joshed that he was "Uncle Joe." Then we had a falling out with the mustachioed Georgian.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Imagine if Henry Wallace was still VP when FDR died! We would have been Uncle Joe's subjects!
Is this french for bent pissy ants?
By the 1960s, scholars — then referred to as revisionists — were advancing the proposition that Truman's foreign policy and the fiendish McCarthy's Red Scare almost drove us to war with Uncle Joe, who died March 4, 1953.
This has been the policy for dealing with a number of dictators: hope they die off (of course, we still had to deal with Stalin's replacements).
The embargos against Castro remain (and I'm not saying remove them) but the only policy seems to be "well, he doesn't have that much longer to live".
The impeached president X42 Bubba Clinton didn't want to have to deal with Saddam so he bombed what he believed to be some of Saddam's weapons program to set him back a few years so Bubba wouldn't have to deal with it (leave this mess for some later President).
Read this from the recent Atlantic interview with Der Slickmeister:
So I think we have to try to give the sanctions one more chance. He's not going to live forever, there are options for regime change short of bombing the living daylights out of them. And we know that these... we know that the inspectors have gotten a ton of stuff out of there. But the effort of trying will bring us together.[londwinded snip...]
But I'm pretty sure this is the right thing to do. Press ahead with this thing, try to.... we knew when we did the bombing in '98 that we hit all the known or suspected sites based on the intelligence we had, from all the people that were doing that work there. we knew at the time that we had set his program back a couple years. But sooner or later in the millennium the new Administration, whether it was Gore's or Bush's, would have to take this matter up again.
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