I took apart a New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Thompson yesterday, which had tried to tell us what the American statesman, George F. Kennan, were he still alive, would have said about counterterrorism.

Thompson has written back, complimenting my remarks as “very smart and complicated” and “much better than some of the other comments I’ve been getting.” But he does take issue with much of what I said, including my contention that he was being dishonest.

In the face of his very gracious note, I gladly retract that last charge. But what I do leave standing is my assertion that his piece is deeply illogical and, if this is not too unfriendly a word, disingenuous.

I won’t summarize the argument so far. Interested readers can click on the relevant links above. But it beggars the imagination that in the war-ravaged year of 1947, when the danger of Soviet expansionism loomed so large, Kennan had in mind, as Thompson asserts, only a non-military means of checking it.

Yes, Kennan wrote a letter to Walter Lippmann saying that we should not intervene militarily in Greece, Turkey, and Iran, where an East-West contest for power was on-going. But he never mailed that letter. Perhaps this was at the request of his boss, Secretary of State George Marshall, as Thompson suggests. Or perhaps, after reflection, it was not his considered opinion: after all, as I noted yesterday, he did speak in his X article in Foreign Affairs of a “firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.” Either way, this one letter cannot be taken to mean that in those years Kennan stood opposed to the use of military force to contain the USSR in all instances.

And yes, Kennan was an advocate of “patience,” as Thompson accurately states. But patience at what? Back in those years, it seems fairly clear that he meant the U.S. should be patient in resisting Soviet expansionism, including by military means, until Communist rule changed or collapsed. He did not mean patiently going to church Sunday after Sunday to pray for a miracle.

Finally, if Kennan (the later Kennan, that is, the one who had disowned the writings of the earlier one) turned out to be wrong about the cold war—as Thompson acknowledges he was both in his Times op-ed and in his comment on contentions—why should we now accept his faulty approach in dealing with al Qaeda? I called this illogical yesterday, and I call it illogical again today.