Did Reagan Win the Cold War?

Salon asks the question, so the answer is pretty obvious, "F' NO!" However, this is a very interesting review of a book that looks like it might be a good read. One part of the Salon review stuck out for me. From a single paragraph we have this, referring to supporting Iraq against Iran (arguably pretty stupid) or the mujahadin against the Soviets (arguably pretty smart):

Today, suffering the blowback from these and other short-sighted interventions, it's easy to write off such foreign adventures as stupid mistakes. Most of them were.

Followed by:

But as Gaddis reminds us, the authoritarian governments of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were truly monstrous; each killed millions of their own citizens through outright repression or atrocious mismanagement. The quantity of human suffering they caused is unimaginable. Knowing what we know now -- that the credibility and appeal of authoritarian communism would eventually wither away and the Soviet Union disintegrate from within -- it's easy to dismiss the threat as illusory, but people then did not know what we know now.

So the conclusion should be that maybe the people living under the threat had a better grasp of what was right & what was wrong than we do currently. Nope. We next get this:

And, it should be said, we do not know now what we will know 50 years from now...

The implication I get out of it is that because, while basically getting the big picture right, stopping the aggression of monstrous regimes in their attempt to spread their horrors to the rest of the world, small mistakes were made that have grown up to bite us on the butt. Therefor, we need to back off fighting the big fight because, while defeating Islamo-Fascists may be a good thing, we may accidently create some small problem that will hurt us down the road. Um, no sorry, BS.
While Islamo-Fascism, to a degree, can be traced back to mistakes made during the Cold War, the take away here, is that as bad as it is, it isn't as bad as things were, so fighting this fight NOW before it grows into something worse is like stopping Hitler when he only had Germany instead of waiting until he had Austria, Czechoslovakia, Alsace, Sudatenland, all of Poland... So, are we going to make mistakes? Yes, every war is filled with them. However the winners aren't the ones that run & hide, but the ones that make the fewest number of mistakes.
The suggestion is that if only we had left the Soviets alone, they would have collapsed completely on their own doesn't take into account that a big part of the collapse was because of the pressure we put on them. Playing this into, if only we left the Islamo-Fascists alone can be completely proven wrong by modern events. For example, we were doing little to nothing to Afghanistan when Osama ran his operations from there and it resulted in the loss of the World Trade Center, damage to the Pentagon and 3000 dead in America. Ignoring the problem won't make it better.