Well said.
I am going to try to explain this nicely. 1. George Bush made a statement to the effect that one does not negotiate with mortal enemies, i.e. terrorists, citing the Nazis and WWII as an example. 2. Pat responded in an article warning folks not to learn lessons of history that are not in fact lessons of history. 3. Pat pointed out that the refusal to negotiate with Hitler was fatal to Poland. Very very fatal indeed.
Your added lesson that France and England could have invaded Germany is lunacy, and shear madness. First, it would have been military suicide, as events so amply demonstrated in the early years of the ground war, where France proved incapable of defending its own turf, and England, separated by the English channel barely held on to a very secure defensive position. Another general lesson of warfare is that a successful offensive war requires about 3 times the number of troops as the force you are attacking. In other words France and England would have required minimally 3 times the number of forces they actually had, as an absolute minimum, just to start thinking about it. There would have been the enormous logistics requirements to get forces in place. The preparations for such a war would have been, certainly, detected by Germany, giving Germany a legitimate causus belli (preparation to attack is always causus belli) and the consequences would have been about the same. France and England had no clue about the ruthless efficiency of the military innovations in equipment tactics and strategy of the Germans until they witnessed it. Finally, after the devestating consequences of WWI on both France and England, their populations would not have stood for starting a war of aggression against Germany. Russia, who ended up on our side, might have thought differently as well.
Last and most especially, you have to take your lessons of history from history as it actually happened. You have no idea how things might have turned out in your make believe fantasy of history as it might have been - might have been all in the imaginings of the brain of one soul imagined in one night in a reckless FR post and not actually played out over years and years in diplomatic halls and battlefields across the world by the billions of individuals that took part in affect or were affected by that war. You have no way of knowing how that might have turned out differently.
I am not here to defend Pat. I am here to defend objectivity and reason, casting to the winds of which is a mortal defect in the soul of post-modern American-style conservatism. I am here on the principle that when you attack a man for what he said, you attack him for what he actually said, after trying to understand what he actually said, and not based on some fantasy of what he might have said. If you believe Pat's correction of Bush's truncation of history is, in fact, wrong, cite where his facts are wrong. But don't tell us that you can counter Pat's real historical facts with some make believe fantasy about how it all would have been better in your own imaginings.