Flashbacks to historical analogies over the Ukraine crisis

Harold Meyerson (On Ukraine: Bernie vs. DSA The American Prospect 02/11/2022) praises Bernie Sanders' excellent speech on Ukraine, Diplomacy in Ukraine 02/11/2022:

Meyerson notes that he has been a decades-long member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the social-democratic group which, as he notes, has seen "explosive growth since 2015 is largely a by-product of Sanders’s presidential campaigns."

But Meyerson criticizes the DSA's position on the Ukraine crisis for being not being harsh enough on Russia:

The word “Russia” appears just three times in its 608-word statement ... That Russia (and Putin, who is not mentioned in the statement at all) instigated the current crisis by its own rather hard-to-miss “ongoing militarization,” or that it even so much as played a role in the bewildering appearance of an army (the Russian one, it would seem) on Ukraine’s border, is somehow omitted from the statement, which attributes the current standoff solely to expansive U.S. militarism. That Putin’s Russia is an autocratic regime that actively seeks to undermine democracy wherever it can is also, apparently, not worthy of comment. [my emphasis]

There's seems to be a heavy dose of nostalgia in Meyerson's comments. What I mean is that during the Cold War, the small number of committed social-democrats like the predecessor to the DSA tended to want to draw a bright line between themselves and the also small number of supporters of the US Communist Party, which was known for consistently reflecting whatever the official Soviet position of the moment on foreign affairs was.

Without trying to rehash the complicated history of social-democrats and communists and their influence on the US labor movement, in the US labor federation AFL-CIO anti-Communism was a strong influence both within labor and in terms of the AFL-CIOs enthusiastic support of Cold War foreign policies. See, for instance: Lovestone’s Thin Red Line The Nation 05/24/1999). Jay Lovestone was a former head of the US Communist Party (1927-1929) who later became the very hawkish head of the AFL-CIO's international affairs operation.

Meyerson ends with a flashback to the old days:

When the Communist Party of yore uncritically praised Stalin’s Soviet Union, not least when it hailed his 1939 pact with Hitler and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Poland, it at least could count on payments of Moscow gold for its efforts. To the best of our knowledge, the current group of DSA apparatchiks—innocents all—provide such encomiums for free.

"Moscow gold" is a real nostalgic touch.

But the Russia-baiting is similar, even though the context is radically different. The parties that were members of the pre-World War II Communist International (Comintern) actually did take the Soviet system as a model goal. I won't say that there are not socialist-minded groups out there who may somehow take Putin's (capitalist) oligarchical form of government as a model. But who knows what quirky variations are out there?

In general, though, to the extent that Putin and his government has cultivated explicit disciples in European and American politics, they have been almost exclusively rightwing parties like Viktor Orbán's Fidesz in Hungary, Marine Le Pen's National Front in France, and the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria. And there may be people on the left who are uncritically enthusiastic about the reporting today on the Russian state channel RT.

But any serious antiwar perspective, from the left or any other point on the political spectrum, has to take a critical perspective on their own country's claims in situations that can lead to war. This week, we're looking at the strange spectacle of the US predicting a possible Russian invasion this week while the Ukrainian President who would be leading the Ukrainian defensive war is publicly mocking the idea that Russia will invade in a day or two. Americans of all political orientations would do well to pay attention to such strange inconsistencies.

The experience of portions of the US labor movement in uncritically backing US Cold War misadventures was not a very inspiring one. (See: Anthony Carew, Conflict Within the ICFTU:Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950Conflict Within the ICFTU: Anti-Communism and Anti-Colonialism in the 1950 International Review of Social History 41:1996)

But I was also struck by Meyerson's analogy to "1939," in this case what's known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, formally the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That agreement was a direct sequel and result of what is surely the most-cited historical analogy, the "Munich" analogy. That would be the Munich Agreement Britain made with Hitler and Mussolini in 1938 that allowed Germany to take part of Czechoslovakia.

Foreign policy by analogy is risky. Jeffrey Record addressed that problem notably well in two books: Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002) and The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). A shorter version of the latter is available online, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Aug 2005)

George H.W. Bush (1924-2018)

The death of an American President is always an occasion for historical retrospectives in the media. Some obviously better than others.

For better or worse, such retrospectives tend to be heavy on hagiography and light on critique. For older people who have been public figures, the media can prepare most of the obituary reports far in advance.

American Presidents are also symbols, both national and political. And their administrations represent historical periods that are identified with their image.

Here are some of the mainstream retrospectives.

The first 15 minutes of the PBS NewsHour Weekend full episode Dec. 1, 2018 is devoted to Bush:

Remembering George H.W. Bush | NYT News 12/01/2018:

NBC News provides 54 minutes of their initial coverage, President George H.W. Bush Dies at 94 11/30/2018. It begins with Joe Scarbrough gushing over the departed President.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks gives an initial retrospective on Bush that stresses the positive, BREAKING NEWS: George H.W. Bush Has Died. Four Amazing Facts About Him 11/30/2018:

Jared Gilmour and Steve Thomma provide one of many general sketches of Bush in  41, Former President George H.W. Bush dies at 94 McClatchy News 12/01/2018. George H.W. Bush is often referred to as Bush 41, his number in the line of Presidents, to distinguish him from his son, George W. Bush, aka, Bush 43.

David Greenberg in Is History Being Too Kind to George H.W. Bush? Politico Magazine 12/01/2018 takes a more critically reflective view: "My friend the historian Tim Naftali has called Bush the most underrated president of our times. I would say that what we’re now seeing proves the opposite: Bush was the most overrated president since Dwight Eisenhower, and possibly of all time."

He mentions a incident from 1992 that I've recalled more than once in the context of the "Russiagate" issues. The largest difference being that many of the criticisms of Trump's and his supporters' dealings with the Russians are well-founded, while George H.W. Bush's accusation against Bill Clinton was entirely frivolous and dishonest:

Bush’s 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton was almost as scurrilous. The sitting president trashed his opponent for protesting the Vietnam War while at graduate school in England and made unwholesome insinuations about Clinton’s motives for visiting Moscow while backpacking. Clinton shot back in a debate: “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. And a senator from Connecticut stood up to him named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”

Greenberg also recalls an important but very bad decision on Old Man Bush's part, "Perhaps the worst act of Bush’s career came at the end of his presidency when he pardoned a bevy of Iran-Contra defendants—including Caspar Weinberger, Robert MacFarlane and Elliot Abrams—to protect himself from further investigation."

The Persian Gulf War of 1991 is a tremendous part of the elder Bush's Presidential legacy. Bush was generally an adherent of a "realist" approach to evaluting foreign policy. Although, as Jeffey Record observes in Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq (2004), "the George H. W. Bush administration, like virtually every one of its predecessors, cloaked its military interventions in the rhetoric of a moral crusade." The chronic American assumption of our own moral superiority and mission to remake the world in our image has been one of the most dangerous assumptions of US foreign policy but has had a huge effect on how wars are perceived by the voters.

His foreign policy also included the invasion of Panama in 1989 with the capture of the de facto Panamanian head of government, Manuel Noriega, who was taken to the US and convicted in American courts of charges related to drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega served in US federal prison until 2010, when he was extradited to France, convicted there, and sent to prison until he was extradited to Panama in 2011. Now he is serving three 20-year prison terms there. Despite the fact that Noriega was demonstrably a criminal, the method of his removal set a dubious precedent, although of course it was justified by the usual rhetoric of human rights and international law. One in a long set of US military interventions in Latin America. A stereotypical question in America about foreign Muslim terrorist attacks has been, "Why do they hate us?" Nobody seems to bother to ask that question about Latin America. Perhaps because the answer is so well known?

Bush is rightly remembered in the various media retrospectives for a pragmatic, sensibly cautious approach to the fall of the East Bloc and then the Soviet Union. But the "shock therapy" conversion of the former Communist economies to "free-market" ones has to be judged on what we know about it's results now. Which are certainly not unambiguously beneficial. And that approach was supported by Old Man Bush's Administraition.

Here are some useful critical looks at Bush and especially his foreign policy.

Charlie Pierce looks at Bush 41's role in the continuing radicalization of the Republican Party and takes a very dim view of his role in the Iran-Contra affair, another giant step toward unaccountability for Presidents in foreign policy. (George H.W. Bush Couldn't Fight His Own Ambition Esquire Politics Blog 12/02/2018))

Robert Scheer also has quite an interesting take from his interactions with Bush on the campaign trail in 1980. (George H.W. Bush’s Entitlement Cool Truthdig 12/01/2018; the piece is an excerpt from a 2006 book of Scheer's)

Mehdi Hasan is distinctly underwhelmed by various aspect of Bush 41 and his Presidency (George H.W. Bush Couldn't Fight His Own Ambition The Intercept 12/01/2018)

The invaluable Juan Cole gives a very good descriptions of how Bush's Persian Gulf War was part of an unfortunate series of US policy decisions in the Middle East. He gives an especially good brief account of how the engagement against Iraq in 1991 created a situation that led to his son's far more disastrous Iraq War. (The Pivotal GHW Bush Presidency: How the US became Mired in the Mideast Informed Comment 12/02/2018) This process is described in much more detail by the also invaluable Andrew Bacevich in his book, America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016).