Recent history gets lost in renewed debate over Yalta

It is interesting that there appears to be more talk and concern these days about what got the United States into the Cold War more than a half century ago than what led to the invasion of Iraq two years ago.
President Bush raised the Cold War issue during his weekend appearance in Latvia, before he headed to Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day. In a reference to Yalta, the 1945 meeting between Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush said, "the captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
Stalin's violation of agreements reached at Yalta led to the Soviet Union's domination of Latvia and the rest of what became known as the Soviet bloc.
Dissecting the results of an end-of-war meeting between a brutal Soviet dictator, a dying U.S. president and a war-weary British prime minister is a natural topic for historians, but it was somewhat surprising to see right-wing radio commentators dive at the Yalta reference like a hungry dog going after a piece of meat.
FDR bashing
Chalk it up, we suppose, to the eagerness of some commentators these days to try to discredit anything connected to FDR. Never mind that Roosevelt was dead before the end of the war and that if any president were responsible for reining in Stalin it would have been Harry S. Truman Truman served from April of 1945, a few months after Yalta, to January 1953, a few months before Stalin died. But Truman isn't nearly as attractive a target for Rush Limbaugh and friends as is Roosevelt.
But while the Cold War debate rages, the Iraq debate languishes.
Last year, the 9/11 Commission Report raised some tantalizing references to the obvious predisposition of the Bush sdministration to go to war against Iraq, but found no evidence that U.S. intelligence efforts had been compromised.
And that would have been the end of the story, perhaps, if it had not been for the British elections.
In the waning days of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's campaign toward re-election, the London Sunday Times disclosed a secret memo by a foreign policy aide to Blair after Blair and Bush met in July 2002. That was eight months before the invasion of Iraq and it was a period when President Bush was telling Congress and the American people that no decision had been made to go to war.
Putting in the 'fix'
The memo summarizing a meeting between Blair and members of his cabinet begs to differ. It states, in part: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam [Hussein], through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." The memo further said that the United States had no patience for working through the United Nations and it broadly outlined U.S. war plans, including projected troop strengths and a rough timeline. It noted that "there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
Coupled with the 9/11 Commission's unchallenged finding that President Bush and some of his top advisers were trying to establish links between Iraq and 9/11 within a day of the World Trade Centers tragedy, the British perception that the administration was willing to "fix" intelligence around policy ought to be explosive.
As of now, there has barely been a whimper from Washington. Eighty-eight congressmen have demanded a response from the president, but the yellowing pages of the Yalta pact are getting more attention than the letter sent days ago to the White House.
Why is that? And will the question only be answered decades from now by historians, or will Congress do its job of representing the American people in a bipartisan fashion by demanding answers now?