I wasn't dodging the question, those simply were not the choices available.
If we kind find a choice that results in total defeat of our enemies for no loss to ourselves, then that is obviously the right choice.
But losses cannot be measured just by the immediate body counts. The treatment of defeated Germans ultimately led to more Americans dying... if the world had not blamed and punished Germany for WW1, maybe several million more people would not have died for nothing fighting WW2.
If we use methods to defeat our enemies which only inspire more enemies, have we really won?
Since you are making up hypothetical choices we didn't have, I would rather add and pick a choice you didn't list. The best solution would be one where Germany never empowered Hitler and would reach its current economic status without having started WW2, as opposed to waiting for Hitler to rise to justify slaughtering thousands or millions of Germans.
Even with hindsight, the right answer can never be determined because we only know with any certainty the history that occurred when an exact pattern of decisions was made in an exact set of circumstances. That doesn't stop us from trying to generalize and apply lessons learned to the future. But far too often people (myself included) can find a historical situation with some vague similarity that will justify whatever opinion they happen to have (great for BBS argument, but almost worthless for actual decision making). As with the weather, the slightest change in any of the variables will cause dramatic unpredictable differences compared to past trends for otherwise similar conditions.
Ironically, history repeats itself not because we forget what happened in the past, but because we remember it. Most actions taken by both people as individuals and as nations are responses to past stimulus. If everyone had forgotten about what happened during WW1, the events between 1920 and 1939 would be entirely different. If the Arabs and Israelis couldn't remember how all the people that have been killed while fighting over the years, maybe they wouldn't be fighting at all.
