Monday October 15, 2007

MORE WARGAMES. On the bad decision not to follow World War II immediately with World War III (the hot kind, not the Norman Podhoretz kind): Jonah Goldberg can't let it alone --

Imagine if we could go back in a time machine and explain to Ike & Co. the consequences of containment: The mountains of corpses, the trillions of dollars, the gulags, killing fields, the military industrial complex, the balance of terror. Does it seem unreasonable to think that maybe Ike & Co. might have concluded that a bit more rollback or, conversely, a bit more diplomacy in 1953 (as Churchill recommended) might be the wiser course?

Why stop with a time machine? Why doesn't Goldberg imagine himself, not only transported back to the dawn of the Iron Curtain, but also equipped with superpowers? Then he could beat up Stalin, and wear a fancy costume.

Alas, Goldberg wavers toward the end:

Here's where I am coming from. I think the best possible policy toward Red China is regime change. Ditto North Korea. Ditto Iran. But, right now, the costs are just way too high to even consider forcibly removing those regimes.

I would speculate that, somewhere on the time-space continuum, conservative pundit 3Xreagan665a is bitterly denouncing Goldberg's shortsightedness. But this would assume that we have a future.

UPDATE. Commenter John Emerson breaks the code: Eisenhower was a commie! There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.