Another comment...

1991. Desert Shield.

34 countries unite in the effort to force Iraq out of Kuwait, and 11 of them are NATO members... but five other NATO states are NOT part of the coalition against Iraq: Turkey, Luxembourg, Portugal, Iceland... and Germany. So, what do we see from this? Once Germany is united and the "wall" is down, mutual defense is less important to the Germans? International cooperation means less in 1991 than it did in the ten or twelve years prior to it? Iceland and Germany are NOT vital to the effort of throwing back the Soviets in the 80s because they weren't involved in the effort to throw back Iraq in the 90s?

You are almost making my point for me. Let's face it... no one is saying that the threat to Western Europe was from the "Warsaw Pact" states... it was from the USSR and the Red Army. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary were all question marks to the Kremlin's plans far more than they were assets. Warsaw Pact "unity" stemmed from Soviet control and thus was not the factor in their equation that "unity" would have been for NATO. If we can see NATO disunity in 1983, 1986, 1989 and 1991... why would we assume that NATO unity would exist at any point within these dates leading up to a Soviet invasion of Europe? Has NATO been any more unified since 1991? No, it hasn't. Four members have removed troops from service in Afghanistan, even though the NATO commitment is still going strong.

See my point? Am I still not being clear? I'm not saying you are wrong... only that NATO and its resolve is still a big enough question for me to say that the cost of winning a war in central Europe starting from a Soviet invasion would NOT have been as easy or as short as I think many people assume. Comparing it to '91 or '03 are not fair comparisons (not that you are making that comparison, either).