Tgk1946's Blog

From The concise untold history of the United States (Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick, 2015) pp257-62

Like Nixon, Bush appealed to voters’ racism and fears of crime.
The strategy turned the tide, and Bush took office in January 1989, placing the destiny of much of mankind in the hands of two men who had witnessed firsthand the ravages of war — Bush as a victor, Gorbachev as a young eyewitness to Germany’s brutal destruction of the USSR.
In the 1990s, with America searching for a new role in a rapidly changing world, the mass media began elevating the World War II generation to especially heroic dimensions. At the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994, the “Greatest Generation” was anointed. This became a nostalgic concept and sales of books, movies, and TV programs boomed. D-Day became the climactic battle of World War I. Even Pearl Harbor, in glorious Technicolor, was turned into a victory.
Conveniently, the media ignored or overlooked the fact that influential Americans, opposed to Roosevelt’s New Deal, had aided and abetted a the Third Reich—after the true nature of Hitler’s anti-Semitic, murderous regime was known. The motive, whether hatred of communism, fascist sympathies, or simply greed, was rarely openly discussed.
Among these men was President Bush’s own father, Prescott Bush. German coal and steel magnate Fritz Thyssen had been one of Hitler’s early backers and much of his wealth was protected overseas by the Brown Brothers Harriman investment firm, through the holding company Union Banking Corporation, in an account managed by Prescott Bush.
In 1942, the U.S. government seized Union Banking Corporation, along with four other Thyssen-linked accounts managed by Bush. And after the war, the shares were returned to the American shareholders, including Bush. Bush wasn’t alone in his dealings with the Nazis. Ford, GM, Standard Oil, Alcoa, ITT, General Electric, the munitions maker Du Pont, Eastman Kodak, Westinghouse, Pratt & Whitney, Douglass Aircraft, United Fruit, Singer, and International Harvester all continued to trade with Germany up to 1941, and many of their subsidiaries carried on operations throughout the war, from which the firms would later reap the profits.
Thus, almost fifty years after the start of World War I, in January 1989, the past once more echoed the present. Could Prescott Bush’s son George, like John Kennedy, repudiate his father’s murky past and partner with the communist Gorbachev in changing the world?
Bush perhaps pondered his options, but he was neither a deep nor a bold thinker. Several times he had scorned what he called the “vision thing,” distrusting individualistic thinking. Like Harry Truman after World War II, he surrounded himself with communist-hating conservatives.
Among them were the strongly anticommunist Dick Cheney as his defense secretary, and as his deputy national security advisor, Robert Gates, the man who’d made his stripes as deputy to the fanatic William Casey. They all agreed that reaching out to Gorbachev would weaken q Western resolve.
Whereas Gorbachey was calling for eliminating tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, an offer most Europeans applauded, the United States countered that the Soviet Union should remove 325,000 troops in ex- change for a U.S. cut of 30,000.
Bush neglected to pursue real progress with the Soviet Union, but when hundreds of prodemocracy demonstrators were slaughtered in Beijing at Tiananmen Square by the Peoples Liberation Army — he placated Chinese leaders by condemning the crackdown publicly and banning military ties, but, behind the scenes, making it clear this would not jeopardize relations between China and the U.S.
Gorbachev pursued the reform of the Soviet system, rejecting the long-held view that controlling Eastern Europe was necessary to Soviet security. In a few extraordinary months in 1989 and 1990, all the Eastern and Central European communist governments fell, one by one, as the world watched in disbelief. It was possibly the most peaceful people’s revolution ever carried out in recorded history — Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania changed their governments without fear.
On November 9, 1989, East and West Berliners jointly tore down the Berlin Wall, desecrating the Cold War’s most reviled symbol. It was a grand moment, evidence of a new beginning. Yet many Americans hailed these actions as the ultimate vindication of the capitalist West after decades of Cold War. State Department policy planner Francis Fukuyama made a name for himself, declaring, “It was the end of history” — proclaim Western liberal democracy the final form of human government.
At Yalta, in early 1945, on the eve of Germany’s surrender, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had gone a long way toward dividing Europe and Asia into Western and Soviet spheres of influence. This structure essentially lasted through proxy wars, near nuclear conflagrations, intense propaganda, and espionage activity for forty-five years.
Now, this was all changing — and quickly. Gorbachev hoped that a new trust might lead to the dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. And, astonishingly, he was even willing to allow East and West Germany to. reunite, on the understanding that NATO would not expand east- ward. Bush led him to believe so, but would be out of power by 1993.
And Gorbachev would pay the price for trusting America, as the Clinton and second Bush administrations expanded NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep.
The Russians felt thoroughly betrayed, and although U.S. officials over the years have insisted that no such promises were ever given, recently, released statements from the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union: at the time and previously classified British and West German documents substantiate the Russian claims that there was a clear commitment.
It was becoming equally clear to some that the United States was not changing its colors to celebrate this new mood of peace. Barely a month after the Berlin Wall fell, in December 1989, with words of praise for a Gorbachev’s restraint in Eastern Europe barely out of his mouth, Bush launched an invasion of Panama.
Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega had long been one of the U.S.’s errand boys in Central America. On the CIA payroll since the 1960s, corrupt and unscrupulous, he profited by assisting Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel. His assistance to the contras in Nicaragua won him protection from top Reagan officials including Casey and Oliver North.
But a 1988 U.S. drug indictment and his overturning of Panama’s 1989 presidential election convinced Bush that Noriega was more liability than asset. He acted. “Operation Just Cause,” he called it, sending in fifteen thousand troops to assist the twelve thousand already in-country and leveling the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorillo, which abutted the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces, killing hundreds of civilians.
This was justified as part of the “war on drugs” declared by Nixon in 1971, which was now being shifted to fight production at the source, which meant, among other things, targeting foreign countries, if need be, for military action. Noriega would be sent to jail in the U.S. for drug. trafficking.
To much of the world, the invasion was shocking and illegal, but to most Americans, indoctrinated with the idea of a war on drugs, it was business as usual in America’s backyard.
Congress further failed to challenge Bush’s flagrant violation of the 1973 War Powers Act. The new message was clear.
Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell declared, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do.” Soviet hardliners, concerned about Gorbachev’s reforms, understood that their concessions would not curb U.S. bellicosity. or predatory behavior. They might in fact embolden the U.S. to act more recklessly. It did — within fourteen months, Bush once again showed how tough he could be. This time in the Middle East.
The Reagan administration had cozied up during the Iran war to Iraq’s: Saddam Hussein, turning a blind eye to his repeated use of chemical weapons, sometimes against his own people, made in part from U .S.-supplied chemicals. When tensions flared between Iraq and oil-rich Kuwait, the U.S, ambassador April Glaspie personally assured Saddam that Bush “wanted better and deeper relations” and had “no opinion” on Iraq’s border dispute.
Hussein took this as a green light from Bush and, the following week, with an estimated 250,000 troops and fifteen hundred tanks, took over. Kuwait with little resistance. Glaspie effectively confirmed that she hat d led Hussein on, telling the New York Times, “1 didn’t think — and nobody else did — that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”
Long desiring a stronger footprint in the Middle East, the U.S. sent Secretary of Defense Cheney, General Powell, and General Norman Schwarzkopf to meet with Saudi King Fahd, to convince him to accept a large American military force as a buffer. When they showed the king photos of Iraqi troops and tanks at the Saudi border, and even across it, the king, upset, reacted and asked for help. But the U.S. photos had been doctored to show that Iraqi forces were digging in with fortifications and trenches close to the border. There is no evidence that Hussein ever intended to invade Saudi Arabia.