Richard Brookhiser: Bush the Relentess Revolutionary

Here is a taste of Brookhiser's latest column in NY Observer.

Now President George W. Bush has gone to Moscow, on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, to pay tribute to the Soviet Union’s achievement in defeating Hitler. At the same time, in very Bush-like fashion, he has been ruffling feathers.

Russia deserves Mr. Bush’s tribute. The first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan were pretty scary, but in the scale of the eastern front in World War II, it was a burp. Hitler lost his vision, his war and his life on the plains of Russia and Poland. Britain and America stabbed Germany in the belly and back in Africa, Italy and France, and incinerated it from the air. But it was annihilated by the Soviet Army.

. . . President Bush added to his trip to Moscow a side trip to Latvia, a former Soviet republic enjoying a still-tentative independence. Latvia’s first tentative independence followed World War I and ended when it was obliterated by the Soviets, the Nazis and then the Soviets again during World War II. Mr. Bush’s visit is an effort to do what we could not do at the time— to say "Alas!" to the defeated. "In Western Europe," Mr. Bush said, "the end of World War II meant liberation. In Central and Eastern Europe, the war also marked … Soviet occupation."