Ah, Jonah, but you also wrote–and I quote:

[I]t seems to me any realistic examination of costs and benefits would find that it would have been far more preferable to take care of the Soviets at the time.

It is to this assertion that Bob Conquest–to whom I sent your entire post, and who does not, after all, need help reading English (or, for that matter, reading Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, or Greek)–responds, “Goldberg quite wrong.”