Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (An Anne Applebaum/Washington Post Edition)

Why on earth should anybody pay money to read this?

Anne Applebaum:

Supporting Democracy -- Or Not - washingtonpost.com: [N]o one can claim that the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has gone unmarked.... But as the anniversary moves into its second week, I'd like to celebrate in a different way -- by asking what, if anything, we in the West have learned since 1956. As many have observed, the American role in the Hungarian Revolution was hardly admirable. Although American governments had spent much of the previous decade encouraging Hungary and other Soviet satellite states to rebel -- using radio broadcasts, speeches, even balloons carrying anti-communist pamphlets -- no one was prepared for the real thing...

No, no, no, no, no! None of this "much of the previous decade" stuff. The Truman administration's policy was "containment." The Eisenhower administration's policy was also "containment"--but as boob bait for the bubbas Eisenhower, Nixon, Dulles, McCarthy, and company all pretended to be for "rollback."

[T]he initial American reaction was confused.... Only after four days of street fighting did the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles -- a man who had spoken often of liberating the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe -- finally declare that the U.S. government did not consider the Hungarians "potential allies." The message was clear: The West would not intervene.... [But] Radio Free Europe was explaining to its listeners how to make molotov cocktails and hinting at the American invasion to come.... The result was a bloody mess.The Hungarians kept fighting even after Soviet tanks arrived, believing help was on the way. Hundreds died. And Western policy in the region suffered a setback from which it took nearly 40 years to recover....

Once again we have an American president who speaks openly and no doubt sincerely about human rights and democracy... Congress, the media and even whole fiefdoms of the State Department that dedicate themselves to democracy promotion.... Try to imagine what would happen if an imaginary group of pro-democracy Saudis staged a street rebellion in Riyadh. No one, of course, would be prepared.... By simultaneously supporting democracy and stability, we would anger the rest of the Arab world, make U.S.-Saudi relations impossible however the rebellion was resolved, and probably damage, in multiple unforeseeable ways, U.S. interests all over the world....

[T]he moral? Don't blame George W. Bush: Chaos in U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. But pity those, whether the Hungarians in 1956, or the Shiites in 1991, who take our democracy rhetoric too literally...

Nonsense. Blame Bush. And blame Eisenhower and Dulles too--Eisenhower and Dulles both knew better, but got into bed with Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy with unseemly enthusiasm.

With writers like Anne Applebaum so eager to whitewash George W. Bush, I don't think the Washington Post will last a decade.

Comments

[Holly Stewart]

I wonder how many American troops Anne Applebaum imagines died during the Hungarian uprising? How many Hungarians did our airstrikes kill? How many hundreds of billions of dollars did we spend in 1956 to create a tragedy of historic scale?

[kvenlander]

"president who speaks openly and no doubt sincerely about human rights and democracy."

Who? Where?

[andres]

I don't know about Eisenhower, but John Foster Dulles certainly did _not_ know better, as seen in the administration's conduct over Guatemala and eventually Cuba. Still, it's nice to have Brad acknowledge that the grownup Republicans weren't in charge of foreign policy either before GW came along.

[Roger Albin]

Andres, Eisenhower was about as grownup a Republican as possible. Dulles talked about "brinksmanship" but his actual decision making was quite conservative. There is a real disjunction between the behavior of the Eisenhower administration in cases like Guatemala and Iran, and what they did in Europe and parts of East Asia. If it was cheap and unlikely to involve direct American entanglement, like in Guatemala and Iran, "rollback" occurred (though this wasn't true rollback because these weren't really Communist regimes). In any situation where a major American entanglement was possible to likely - Hungary, Suez, Korea, Vietnam - the Eisenhower administration, which in foreign policy often sought and had the strong backing of Congressional Democrats, was cautious and pragmatic. The contrast with Bush II in terms of actual policy couldn't be greater. The criticism about the rhetoric of the Republicans of that period is, however, quite correct. The Eisenhower Republicans were hypocrites but they were quite intelligent about actual policy.

[Hedley Lamarr]

Applebaum appears to be the Post's resident intellectual. By saying, "Don't blame George W. Bush", she abdicates that honor.

[liberal]

Roget Albin wrote, "The Eisenhower Republicans were hypocrites but they were quite intelligent about actual policy."

Compared to GW, sure, though that's a pretty low bar to set. But looking at the long sweep of history, the interventions in Guatemala and Iran were disasters.

Of course, I'd assume few in the foreign policy elite were any better than the Eisenhower Republicans.