General Eisenhower, after weeks of asking for a meeting with the President, is finally escorted in to the Oval Office, where he is shocked to find out that W has been meeting with General MacArthur, devising a detailed plan to invade Soviet Manchuria immediately.

The strategy of invading Soviet Manchuria catches the world by surprise, but W sells the American public on the idea by citing the need to defeat all the world's menacing totalitarians – Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin. After all, he says, Stalin's worldwide Bolshevik revolution was as much a totalitarian threat to the United States as the Empire of Japan or the Third Reich.

Uhhhh, the Gadflyer Newspaper would write, but Stalin and Hitler don't really get along, and the Soviets and Japanese were historic enemies dating back to the Russo-Japanese War. And even if invading the Eastern Soviet Union were a good idea, one might have argued, total defeat Tojo and Hitler must be the immediate priority.

[...]

June 6, 1944 would roll around, and Ike and Churchill are ready to lead D-Day. The British, French, Canadian troops are all ready for the assault. But Americans can send only limited troops because the vast majority are caught up in the Outer Manchurian guerilla war (for any one who thinks the low intensity war in Iraq is new, Google "Stalingrad"). Meanwhile, W refuses to institute the draft for the Manchurian War. Plenty of volunteers signed up after Pearl Harbor, but he knows the public, so approving of the Japanese War, is deeply divided over the Manchurian war, and that there would be draft riots.

Meanwhile, essential projects to win the war are going neglected, underfunded, and understaffed.

The OSS (the CIA's predecessor) is given few Japanese or German interpreters. When the Manhattan Project is finally funded, it has no leadership, since DOD assigns J. Robert Oppenheimer's team to Manchurian logistical operations. Albert Einstein, who might have helped develop the bomb for the war against Germany and Japan, refuses to assist in light of the Manchurian adventure. Intelligence operations are neglected, so America fails to gather intelligence about Hitler's V2 rockets.

(Not that it mattered all that much – in November, 1941, Admiral Nimitz delivered a stark intelligence briefing to the President, entitled "Japanese determined to attack U.S. Fleet on American soil," but the President, on the ranch for a weeks-long Thanksgiving vacation, considered the briefing to be "non-specific" and of a "historical nature.")

Likewise, OSS agents in Tokyo are reassigned to Manchuria, so we miss key intercepts tipping us off to the Japanese's newest tactic: Kamikazes. (You know, using airplanes as missiles/suicide bombs? I know, no one could possibly have imagined it.)

1945 rolls around, and the U.S. (largely with Chinese KMT help) has managed to push the Japanese back off the Asian continent, and the Brits, largely with French resistance and Commonwealth soldiers, has liberated France. The U.S. has even captured Stalin in a Moscow spider hole! But Tojo and Hitler are still alive and at large. They may or may not still be commanding their soldiers – nobody's really sure. And the SS and Kamikazes are still wreaking havoc. The war goes on.

Especially in Manchuria! 150,000 more soldiers required to stabilize it. W calls for the formation of a "United Nations" at San Francisco, but the Canadians, Aussies, Chinese, and others refuse, led by General de Gaulle (who is such a contrarian frog pain in the ass, he only makes W more of a unilateralist).

April 1944. No meeting of the American and Russian armies on the Elbe. No United Nations or meaningful world alliance. Quagmire without final victory.

W travels to the War College in Pennsylvania to give a speech clarifying his WWII strategy of turning Manchuria over to the Manchurians. He still claims that the invasion was necessary in light of Pearl Harbor.

Read the entire essay here.