Thank you for candor in conceding
1) you favor US war in Iran.
2) you consider anyone who is skeptical about a third US war in the middle east in the space of 12 years, a “pacifist”
3) and now, you reject that Reagan won the Cold War (without launching any hot wars! he also didn’t invade Iran even though it was ruled by the ayatollah and its nuclear ambitions date back to even before Reagan’s time)
As for the caution by MacArthur — a “pacifist,” by your definition — against more land wars in Asia: that warning to JFK by the Five Star General hero of Inchon and Manila, was reported by no fewer than three of JFK’s top aides: Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen, and Gen. Maxwell Taylor. See, e.g., the citations in Douglas MacArthur: Warrior as Wordsmith, by Brian Duffy and Ronald Carpenter, p. 151
Again, I don’t call what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan “wars”. World War II was a war, because we fought to win. Therefore, to fight Iran will certainly have to be the USA’s first war in the region. The fiascoes (not wars, just to make things clear once more) in Iraq and Afghanistan were waged by pacifists who really believed their own liberal rhetoric and utterly failed to understand the enemy.
Bernard K. Duffy, who wrote “The Politics of Rhetoric”, very critical of Richard M. Weaver and his stand against communism, even accusing him of “political paranoia”? Also, I’d be skeptical of anything JFK’s aides reported, especially Schlesinger, a hardcore leftist Democratic operative (I hope that is not the kind of person you admire), Sorensen (Chappaquiddick apologist) or Taylor (the object of derision in “Dereliction of Duty”, mainly for failing to devise a plan to decisively defeat the North Vietnamese Army). MacArthur’s true character was that which got him fired by Truman (which was folly on that president’s part)—gearing up to counterattack against Red China in Korea.