Here's the thing, though. That is completely irrelevant. You have to put yourself back in 1945. And I ask this question. Where would the national will have been in 1945 to go to war with someone who was our best buddy not a month earlier? Who we were dancing with and trading vodka shots with not a month earlier after we crushed Cpl. Schicklegruber and his minions. What do you think the national reaction have been if, say, on June 1, 1945, Harry Truman had gotten on the radio and said, "We're now declaring war on Russia and we're going all the way to Moscow? Quite honestly, I don't know if there would've been any conceivable scenario under which the U.S. public, again looking at things through a 1945 prism, with us just having whipped Germany and having not whipped Japan yet, to swing right into a war with the Russians.
And the whole gist of this thread is Oliver Stone/grassy knoll nonsense, IMHO. Patton was killed in a car wreck. Period. And I'm sorry, but as great a general as he was ... and he was GREAT ... he was not as big a hero in the U.S. in 1945 as Ike.
Uh, another realist. Ollie is going to find that there was no conspiracy in any case.
Ike was a hero because of guys like Patton.
How hard would it have been for Truman to reveal that FDR was compromised by the communists, and his physical frailty after leading US to victory? He could have then used the nuclear threat to back the Soviets out of Europe quite easily, using a bomb or two if they stood up. War is a matter of will only since we unleashed the atom. After other caught up things changed radically, but the US was in a position to dominate forever the world, and we turned it down.
No more than America's reaction in 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. And of course it wouldn't have been like the above. You exploit various reasons to enter war. The case for an attack on Russia in 1945 may have been more easily made than for Iraq in 2003. The obvious is the lack of resolve in '45 and what we have been blessed with in a POTUS in '03. Russia did kill tens of millions and enslaved through an ideology hundreds of millions. Some of that still continues. Iraq's past and future intentions were clear. Our President made the tough choice for the "world community" knowing what the future may have held.
If they hadn't kept playing kissy face with the russians we might have had the will to prevent them occupying all of eastern europe for over 40 years. But then, Roosevelt's cabinet was lousy with soviet commies and spies, as we all know, and we had the rats leading us, and we see now how communist they are. Labor unions - communist. Hollywood -- communist. Academia -- communist. State Department - communist. UN -- communist.
It's a miracle they haven't brought us down yet. Shows where tolerance of the left gets you.
"Where would the national will have been in 1945 to go to war with someone who was our best buddy not a month earlier? "
Best Buddy? We WERE at war with Russia - do you realize how many thousands of American POWs the Russians held after the war?
This alone would have demanded swift and nuclear action.