“LET ME BE CLEAR” …CAN’T MAKE IT TO CEREMONY FOR THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=511399
Cold War: The White House has announced our absence at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Russia has been practicing a nuclear invasion of an abandoned Poland.
The Berlin Wall has been a famous backdrop for American presidents sounding the battle cry of liberty in the struggle against tyranny. It was there that John F. Kennedy expressed our solidarity with the encircled residents of that outpost of freedom with his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner.” And it was there that Ronald Reagan, with a defiant “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” voiced our determination not to merely contain or get along with Soviet Communism, but to defeat it.
On Nov. 9, 1989, the people of Berlin did just that, secure in the knowledge that an economically and militarily revived America had their back. But that was then and this is now.
Today, American leaders travel the world expressing their regrets for our alleged past transgressions, and American exceptionalism is no longer part of our vocabulary. We’re just another one of the gang, sandwiched alphabetically between Uganda and Upper Volta, whose votes cancel ours in an international community to which we pledge our fealty.
On the 20th anniversary of this triumph of freedom, it appears than no American president will be there to celebrate, much less remember, the day that the “evil empire” was consigned to the ash heap of history.
Words have consequences and dates have significance. It did not escape the notice of the Poles and indeed the rest of Europe when we chose the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, to tell the Polish government in a midnight phone call that we were pulling the plug on our commitment to place ground-based missile interceptors in Poland.
Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland’s leading news magazines, reveal that at that same time the Russians were conducting war games in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practiced amphibious landings on the coast of a “potential aggressor.” In the exercises, the potential aggressor was Poland.
As the London Telegraph reports, the Russian air force practiced using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland on the northeast, forces stormed a “Polish” beach and attacked a gas pipeline. “It’s an attempt to put us in our place,” said Marek Opiola, a member of Poland’s parliament. “Don’t forget all this happened on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.”
Before we reneged on our commitment to place ground-based interceptors in Poland, Soviet President Medvedev threatened to deploy SS-26 Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, right between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania. In the 1980s, when the Soviet Union targeted Europe with its SS-20s, a first-strike weapon of unmatched power, President Reagan responded quite differently, upping the ante by deploying Pershing missiles in West Germany.
In July, leading European freedom fighters, including Poland’s Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel, wrote an open letter to President Obama warning that the Russia of Medvedev and Putin “is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods.”
In March, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red “reset button” to symbolize improved ties, but the gift drew smiles as the word “reset” was mistranslated into the Russian word for “overcharge.”
Something else was apparently lost in the translation. We need to press the reset button again, back to the days when American presidents stood in Berlin and echoed the cry of Scottish patriot William Wallace: “Freedom!”
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