Bad idea. Napoleon's invasion failed, Hitler's invasion WILL fail, and I doubt America could beat the Russians on their home soil.
Senator Philipps,
What you've said is true to a point, but any American liberation of Russia from the Soviet Union would be far different from either Napoleon's invasion or Hitler's expected invasion.
Firstly,
unlike Napoleon and Hitler, we would not be fighting a two-front war. During his invasion of Russia, Napoleon was engaged in a full-scale war in Spain that kept hundreds of thousands of his best troops from deployment to Russia, while Hitler will need to remove entire armies from the Soviet border to prevent rebellions in the occupied nations and guard against a British counter-offensive. By contrast, any American effort would focus purely on the Soviets (as any wars against the Axis powers would be concluded before even considering a war with the USSR), and we could deploy all our forces to the front (since we could use our Navy to safeguard our shores)
Secondly,
unlike Napoleon and Hitler, we will not fight the Soviet Union alone. Napoleon relied heavily on soldiers from nominally "allied" nations to fill his ranks; thus, when the war , these men - and the nations and states they stood for - often turned against him, driving him into a rapid spiral of destruction. Similarly, Hitler's
Wehrmacht will be supported by only his puppets and erstwhile "allies," many of whom, such as Hungary, Romania, and Finland, could defect to our cause, given the opportunity. If we invade the Soviet Union, on the other hand, we will be supported by dedicated friends and comrades-in-arms, who will owe the liberation of these nations to us - and who will stand by us to the war's end, regardless of its outcome.
Finally - and perhaps most critically -
unlike Napoleon and Hitler, we would seek to liberate Russia, not conquer it. Had Napoleon freed the serfs from the oppression of the Tsars, he would have encountered minimal resistance from the Russian peasantry, and could have found shelter and resupply in sympathetic Russian cities, thereby making the Russian people his ally against the Tsar; instead, he left the serfdom intact, allowing the Tsar to paint Napoleon's invasion as a war against the Russian nation and dooming Napoleon to defeat. Likewise, if Hitler were to focus purely on eradicating Communism, he could build support among anti-Communist and nationalist partisans within the USSR, and thereby prevent Moscow from rallying its people in another "Great Patriotic War"; fortunately for the Kremlin, Hitler's expansionist ideology precludes any possibility of such insight, and will prompt ordinary Russians to take up arms against him. But if we were to declare war on the Soviet Union, for the sole purpose of liberating the nation of Russia from Communist slavery, we could turn the Russian people against the Bolshevik regime, thereby protecting our supply columns from guerrilla attacks and ensuring that the Red Army finds itself staffed by unwilling conscripts rather than willing volunteers.
Would destroying the Communist regime be easy? No, for a conflict between the United States of America and the Soviet Union would be, without a doubt, the bloodiest conflict in the history of the world - even more violent and destructive than one between America and the Nazi regime in Berlin. But when we succeed, we will have eradicated the single greatest menace to our liberty in history, and made the world - for the first time in recorded history - truly safe for democracy.
Perhaps, given your background, you believe that the Communist Party may eventually disband its totalitarian "government" in favor of a democratic society... but given that - in spite of the clear and present danger posed by Nazi Germany, its greatest ideological nemesis - the totalitarian regime of Moscow has crippled its own army to satisfy the paranoia of a mad dictator, I am uninclined to put either my faith or my arms in Soviet hands.
- Senator Stephen McCarthy (D-TX)
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