Dweeb asks for clarification:
The question I have is, in your view, if FDR had re-armed in ’36-37, and attacked the Axis, or at least Germany, in ’38 or ’39, would that have been a good thing, or a bad thing? Would it be justified in the hindsight of what we now know Hitler was up to?
I think that would have been a Very Bad Thing. The flaw in this argument is that decisions leading up to historical events are fluid. For example, until the autumn of 1941, Hitler had absolutely no plans to exterminate European Jewry. At that time, he and Himmler favored various resettlement plans, inspired by the Polish government’s 1937 approach to France and Great Britain regarding the deportation a million Polish Jews to the French colony of Madagascar.
Robert Wistrich: “At this early stage, Himmler explicitly rejected ‘as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.”
Even worse, an early and unprovoked American-led invasion of Germany in 1938 would have risked bringing the Soviet Union into the war as a member of the Axis. The two dictatorships were quite friendly at the time and it was only Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin that led the Soviets into the Allied camp.
Military history is the history of unintended consequences. Imperial overstretch is the order of the day, from Greece to Rome, and I think the odds are very highly against the possibility that the Iraqi adventures will be viewed as a salutary action by the United States government.
Already, we have replaced a feeble secular dictatorship with an Islamist neo-democracy supported by Iran. This might be a good first step in a global war against Ba’athists, but I am not terribly sangine about it being a net positive in a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism much less in a secular crusade against the global jihad.