All right class! Sit up...pay attention; we're about to pose a thought-provoking historical question:

What if President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) had lived 6 more months? Would he have dropped the BOMB? And would we have witnessed the end of World War 2 by August, 1945? 

And could the war have evolved into a worse conflagration? Raise your hand if you know.

After Roosevelt's disastrous giveaway at Yalta in early 1945 to Josef Stalin, the Red Army had a "green light opportunity." With eastern Europe in hand, Stalin directed them to head south, and by August 1945 the Red Army was massing on the border of Iran.

So what would Roosevelt have done? In all probability-- nothing.

Stalin would have then proceeded straight to Tehran, and installed a new Tudeh (Communist) regime in no time.

But most fortunately, it was Harry Truman at the helm, who would literally terrify Stalin out of Iran-- purely on a bluff. 

Truman-- immediately upon being sworn-in-- recognized Stalin's true intention: Communist expansion, not only into eastern Europe, but also into the oil-rich Mideast.

But Stalin believed that America was ready to follow the lead of the late, liberal, trusting FDR, calculating that Truman would not at all want to risk extending the war onto a new front (Mideast). Stalin would be proven wrong-- very wrong!

Truman immediately had made up his mind; he would send Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith to personally meet with Stalin in the Kremlin, to deliver the most "strongly worded" message in presidential history.

But for the sake of historical context, a little backround on the country formerly known as "Persia." 

In 1908, British colonials discovered oil in Persia, and formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company-- later evolving into British Petroleum.

After World War I, Persia's ruler, Ahmad Shah, proved to be grossly incompetent, and in 1921, the pro- British "Reza Khan Merpanji" (1877-1944) was put on the throne, who then changed his name to "Pahlavi" (in deference to an ancient Persian language translation).

But the "Reza Khan move" eventually backfired on the British.

Ol' Reezy turned out to be a political weathervane, and in betrayal, he decided to entreat Adolf Hitler in Germany, even going so far as to decree that Persia would henceforth be known as "Iran," meaning..."Land of Aryans".

Hitler felt genuinely complimented that the country had re-named itself as home of the "Master Race", and recognizing Iran's strategic importance, a German-Persian alliance was formed in 1939 after the start of the war.

The Allies, greatly alarmed, invaded Tehran in August 1941 and deposed the pro-Nazi Reza Khan, installing his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1917-1980) as the next leader.

The Russians stayed in Iran until Autumn, l942 when they were forced to withdraw and reinforce their army against Hitler's invasion into Stalingrad. 

To this day, historians question Hitler's stubborn refusal to allow his huge Stalingrad force to surrender. But if one examines the world map in mid-1942, it reveals expansionist Nazi armies; one moving east toward the Suez under Rommel, and a huge, 600,000 man force moving south on Stalingrad under von Paulus.

If Hitler had struck at Stalingrad only 3 months earlier, he would have taken the city, moved south to hook up with the Iranians, and could have met Rommel closing in from the west--possibly winning the war as early as mid 1943.

Stalin (like Hitler) understood Iran's strategic importance, so upon meeting with FDR and Churchill at the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943, Stalin conned the trusting Roosevelt, and agreed..."In exchange for continued U.S. aid, I will make no post-war move on Iran." 

This was one of many of Stalin's big lies, which set the stage for Roosevelt's disastrous giveaway at Yalta.

Four months after Roosevelt's death, Stalin dispatched a Red Army column to march from Soviet Azerbaijan across the border to Iran, with orders to seize the capital, Tehran. 

Now enter the firebrand, no-nonsense persona of Harry Truman, who--via his ambassador-- then delivered his fateful "ultimatum" to Stalin, which in so many words had said:

"Dear Mr. Stalin; we think you're just a bit out of bounds, and have violated your agreement at Tehran. Thus, if you recall the 2 big bombs we recently dropped on Japan, if your army doesn't withdraw from the Iranian border within 48 hours, I will immediately dispatch ANOTHER atomic bomb mission from our bases in Libya, and drop the next one right on their fur-capped Soviet heads!" 

Stalin complied--and rather quickly.

But liberal, revisionist historians have downplayed Truman; so you hear little of the heroic stand he took against Stalin at the end of hostilities in 1945, when the U.S. actually had no THIRD atomic bomb.

But what if Truman had not bluffed Stalin? The entire Mideast map of post-World War II might have gone all Communist, and to this very day, the Russians might be the ones we would be paying for imported oil, instead of OPEC.

Indeed, history has completely ignored Truman's sheer cunning;

The U.S. was at least 6 months away from assembling a third atomic bomb. But the media despised the blunt-talking, monotone-voiced Missourian, being the reason why it took so long for Truman to take his rightful place in history as perhaps the boldest and most intuitive president of the 20th century.

And on the flip side of fate, what if FDR dies a month EARLIER, say around March 12, 1945?

It's not the least bit of a stretch that a highly-aggressive George Patton would have told a newly sworn-in Harry Truman..."Mr. President, l can chase these Russkies all the way back to the Ukraine-- just gimme the green light!"

By March '45, given the arrival of the newly-upgraded, General Pershing tanks, replete with a high-velocity 90 mm. main gun, and the legions of B-24 & B-17 bombers-- plus heavily-armed P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters (6 or 8 .50-caliber Browning machine guns)-- the United States was indeed the most powerful war machine the world had ever seen.

And despite the numerical superiority of the Soviet armies on the ground, the Americans could have thrown 10 times as much steel as the backwardly-armed Russians (particularly the Red Air Force), and General Patton, and 8th Air Force General Curtiss LeMay, could have blasted the Soviets all the way back to the Ural Mountains-- and beyond.

And  the Cold War? it would have been nothing but a figment in Winston Churchill's imagination.

But what would FDR have done if he had lived 6 more months? Let's pontificate:

In his trusting liberal heart, FDR may have told his generals..."Oh, let Mr. Stalin go; he can have Iran, it's only fair; the Russians did most of the anti-Nazi fighting; they're our allies; no sense in arguing; bring our boys home; we have no interest in those deserts; we've got plenty of oil back here at home"... etc.

And in a perverse way of reasoning, if not for Roosevelt's April,1945 cerebro-vascular accident (stroke), what then? In retrospect, it may have been one of the most fortunate "accidents" in modern world history.

Beginning with FDR (and his Yalta fiasco) liberal presidents have always trusted our enemies, and have had a compulsion to be "fair" to them. But  fortunately (for America) a conservative president came along every time to sweep up the mess.

In the post-war era, it was the liberal Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), who decided to escalate a regional overseas conflict into a full blown war (Vietnam), for reasons that are only known to him.

But Johnson not only blundered America into an unnecessary conflict, the LBJ presidency was also germane in debasing our currency.

In the late 60's, Vietnam war costs were spiraling out of control. The Pentagon's war budget was exploding; inflation was bubbling up. The dollar was sinking.

So Mr. Johnson 'cleverly' decided to set a economic precedent that has flourished to this very day-- unleash a new federal reserve strategy-- run the printing presses.

In all its previous wars, the U.S. had enacted either tax hikes, or selling what the old timers refer to as "war bonds". But LBJ had the fed crank out approximately 80 billion in unbacked paper currency, to keep his Great Society ship of state afloat.

So by March of 1971, the wolf was at the Whitehouse door, and with inflation spiraling out of control, Nixon was forced to abandon the gold standard, and the irreparable damage to the U.S. dollar had been done-- never again would it be pegged to the price of gold-- it would float up or down in relation to the other currencies of the world.

Then in 1977, liberal democrat Jimmy Carter (Mr. Human Rights), immediately began his naive destruction of our foreign intelligence agencies, approving the firing of 400 of our best CIA agents(many of them in the Mideast)-- an ongoing disaster that has affected America calamitously to the present day.

Carter intuitively MISUNDERSTOOD the depths of hatred that the radical Islamist movement would have toward America.

Once the surprise revelation became known that the Shah of Iran was in trouble, Carter actually sided WITH Ayatollah Khomeini, because he, like himself, was a "religious man", and would "never violate the human rights of the Iranian people" as the Shah had done with his secret police force (SAVAK).

Carter foolishly failed to realize that Khomeini could actually be more "unfair" than the Shah; and would employ Iran's oil revenues AGAINST the United States.

Carter let the Shah fall in ignominy. And just as history blames Roosevelt for the Cold War, Carter could be considered the defacto founder of radical Islam.

And what about the liberal Bill Clinton, and his baseless trusting of our "ally," the Chinese?

In February of 1996, President Clinton authorized the export of critical booster-rocket and satellite technology to China, undercutting the Justice Department's investigation that it would greatly harm U.S. national security.

A New York Times reporter uncovered the actual plot:

In an admission by Democratic fund-raiser Johnny Chung, it was revealed a quid-pro-quo had occurred-- Clinton had received nearly $100,000 in Chinese "contributions" for his re-election campaign of 1996.

Currently, China is practicing how to shoot down orbiting satellites; and to our peril, the media has deliberately ignored Clinton's responsibility, having saved China approximately 15-20 years of difficult research-- all for campaign contributions. 

And now that the Chinese are flush with cash (most of it ours) they are going all-out to develop a threat the U.S. hasn't witnessed since Stalin acquired our hydrogen bomb secrets in 1949: the DF- 21 missile, a  'kill weapon' to target & destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.

The DF-21 rises above the atmosphere at Mach-10, then plunges rapidly with "smart bomb" guidance capability to strike a large moving target at sea-- thereby rendering the U.S. naval carrier umbrella almost useless.

Imagine all American carriers-- going the way of the World War II battleships-- becoming obsolete almost overnight; all through the courtesy of Mr. William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton's reckless actions with China may now have now greased the skids for a possible future war, but you'll never hear about it in the pro-liberal media, who-- ever since the days of FDR-- have covered up the sinful mistakes of democrats, and the reason why the U.S. military is as necessary now as it was in 1941, or at any other time in America's storied history.

But despite all the negative slant of the media, the United States has been an honorable country, and has never kept territory, or plundered any land we've conquered.

Let's all play pretend for a minute; pretend that an oil strike was discovered along the Israeli-Gaza border. Like the fabled story of Jed Clanton- a wayward Katusha rocket exploded somewhere in a field and..."up from the ground came some bubblin' crude"...a new, 5 billion barrel oil field!

Something like oil wealth from an actual discovery could go a long way to resolve the hatred between Israel and the Palestinians; a bitter rift that supposedly cannot be reconciled. But in the Middle East, oil money changes everything; and it would certainly go a long way in "healing" the historic divide between the two side-by-side populations. But alas, they reside on land that has no oil to be found.

Currently the conflict is raging into its second week, as Israel continues its war on the Hamas rocketeers and their radical Islamic leaders; who defiantly continue their aggression by firing a barrage of 40-50 rockets a day; and all are provocatively aimed at civilian targets within Israeli territory.

With all the media reports of the intense suffering of the civilian populations, people around the world can only wonder, "Why do these people continue to hate each other so much... especially when they reside so close together? Like Rodney King once posited, "Can't they all just get along"?  But is there more at play here than only hatred? For Israel in the Gaza strip, the source of their conflict lies 1200 miles to the east.

The images from the fighting in Gaza are harrowing but ultimately deceptive. They portray a mighty invading army, one equipped with F-16 jets bombing a civilian population, and defended by a few thousand fighters armed with primitive rockets. But expand the picture, and the true nature of this conflict emerges: Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting- Iran.

Many in the West have yet to grasp that the Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state, but about preventing the region's takeover by radical Islam.Iran has co-opted Hamas into transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a jihad against the Jewish state.

So now lets proceed to connect all the dots; but first, we must partake of a brief history lesson:

For years, the shahs ruled Iran. By 1970, Iran was the world's second largest exporter of oil. Iran had great geo-political importance, because it was seen as a buffer between the Soviet Union and the world's largest oil reserves. These factors made the Shah's overthrow in 1978, and Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power, all the more important.

And with a more moderate Iran in 2003, would the Iraq war have gone more easily? And would Israel and Hamas even be fighting today? The entire geopolitical map in the Middle East may have turned in a different pro-western direction, as opposed to the present reality.

With the winding down of the long Iraq war, the moderate Islamic states now realize that it's not Israel, but a nuclear-armed Iran that should be the focus of their attention. Even the Russians have good reason to be nervous-- a nuclear-capable Iran would pose a huge threat to all their surrounding "stans"...Uzbekistan, Kurdistan, Kazakstan, etc.

And would Iran now be on the verge of nuclear proliferation, and threatening the entire Mid East with nuclear aggression? Future history can only answer that.