George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

having to reckon with the danger that Honecker's tanks would open fire. Baker's visit was
designed to delay, sabotage and stall German reunification in whatever ways were still
possible, while shoring up the communist regime. Baker gave it his best shot, but his
sleazy dealmaking skills were of no use in the face of an aroused populace. Nevertheless,
after Tien An Men and Potsdam, Bush was rapidly emerging as one of the few world
leaders who could be counted on to support world communism.
During the early months of 1990, certain forces in Moscow, Bonn, and other capitals
gravitated towards a new Rapallo arrangement in a positive key: there was the potential
that the inmates of the prison-house of nations might attain freedom and selfdetermination,
while German capital investments in infrastructure and economic
modernization could guarantee that the emerging states would be economically viable, a
process from which the entire world could benefit.
A rational policy for the United States under these circumstances would have entailed a
large-scale committment to taking part in rebuilding the infrastructure of the former
Soviet sphere in transportation, communications, energy, education, and health services,
combined with capital investments in industrial modernization. Such investment might
also have served as a means to re-start the depressed US economy. The pre-condition for
economic cooperation would have been a recognition by the Soviet authorities that the
aspirations of their subject nationalities for self-determination had to be honored,
including through the independence of the former Soviet republics in the Baltic, the
Trans-caucasus, central Asia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere. As long as long as the Soviet
military potential remained formidable, adequate military preparedness in the west was
indispensable, and should have featured a significant committment to the "new physical
principles" anti-missle defenses that had inspired the original Strategic Defense Initiative
of the 1983. Obviously, none of these measures would have been possible without a
decisive break with the economic policy of the Reagan-Bush years, in favor of an
economic recovery program focussed on fostering high-technology growth in capitalintensive
industrial employment producing tangible, physical commodities.
Bush never made a serious proposal for the economic reconstruction of the areas included
within the old USSR, and was niggardly even in loans to let the Russians buy agricultural
commodities. In November, 1990, Gorbachov addressed a desperate plea to world
governments to alleviate the USSR food shortage, and sent Foreign Minister
Shevardnadze to Washington in the following month in hopes of obtaining a significant
infusion of outright cash grants for food purchases from US stocks. After photo
opportunities with Baker in Texas and with Bush at the White House, all Shevardnadze
had to take back to Moscow was a paltry $1 billion and change. Within a week of
Shevardnadze's return, he resigned his post under fire from critics, referring to sinister
plans for a coup against Gorabchov. The coup, of course, came the following August. It
should have been obvious that Bush's policy was maximizing the probability of ugly
surprises further down the road.
Bush did not demand self-determination for the subject nationalities, but sided with the
Kremlin against the republics again and again, ignoring the January, 1991 bloodbath in