Hmm, go read the article, he is not so off base as the cut and paste implies.
Not that I agree, but his point is valid: If liberating France meant a Communist Poland, why go to war at all?
If signing a peace treaty with England means Hitler proceeds west to claim territory, then why sign the treaty with England?
He is being too simplitic in his approach, but he has one valid point above all: Why in the world are we celebrating tossing Hitler out of Germany, when the end result was a worse dictator enslaving more nations than Hitler attacked and killing more people than Hitler did?
After reading the whole Article, I disagree with much of the disagreement; he is being provacative, but he is NOT calling the war on Hitler a mistake, he is calling our assessment of victory a mistake when the end result was the enslavement of more nations and people than Hitler tried to do himself.
Leaving aside the fact the he declared war on us, Poland didn't become Communist because we liberated France. There's no connection between the two, and we can clearly call WWII a victory. We liberated Western Europe, which is better than liberating nothing, despite the fact that Stalin stayed in power. Unfortunately Poland was screwed either way, though at least the avoided complete dismemberment and were able to emerge at the end of the cold war, something that wouldn't have happened under either of the 1939-1940 models. I suspect Pat's opinion is based on the idea that liberating Western Europe Hitler isn't necessarily a good thing. The idea that Hitler wouldn't have turned on France and England when the time was right, which underlies Pat's theory, is dubious. Are we in the wrong in Iraq because we're not liberating Iran? Wrong in South Korea by leaving North Korea alone?