Pearl Harbor: the “Day of Infamy.” The archetypal unprovoked aggression. The sneak attack that killed more than 2,300 unsuspecting Americans.
But was it really unprovoked?
Not so unprovoked as most Americans have believed for 70 years. The U.S.had actually engaged in a pattern of provocation long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor at 7:48 on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. A rough outline:
In July, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Pearl Harbor amid a visible buildup of the American fleet in the Pacific. Concerning that buildup, a Japanese general, Kunishiga Tanaka, wrote in a Japanese newspaper, “Such insolent behavior& makes us think a disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the Pacific.” The next year, Roosevelt gave Pan American Airways clearance to build runways on Wake Island, Midway Island and Guam.
In November, 1940, Roosevelt loaned China $100 million to fight Japan. U.S. Treasury Henry Morgenthau began arranging to send bombers with American crews to attack Tokyo and other cities in Japan. In December of that year, Morgenthau and the Chinese minister of finance colluded on a plan to firebomb Japan. The following May, the New York Times reported on the plan under the headline, “Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected.”
Two months later, in July, 1941, Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. Britain and the U.S. cut off deliveries of oil and scrap metal to Japan. Minutes from a meeting at 10 Downing Street in London in August, 1941 quote British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as saying, “Everything was to be done to force an incident”—meaning an incident that would create a pretext for the United States to enter the war.
And in November, 1941, just weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked, George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, told a group of journalists, “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” and asked them to keep it off the record.
Why dredge up this history? Because it’s instructive with regard to far more recent developments. More than 2,300 Americans died at Pearl Harbor, though our government had intelligence to the effect that an attack was likely to happen there; this was the collateral damage attending the creation of a pretext for the unpopular move of going to war. Leaving aside the question of whether the U.S. could or should have left Europe prey to Hitler, a subterfuge that costs more than 2,000 lives is a costly one.
Those events also cast an oblique light on the events of September 11, 2001. Did our government actively or passively collude in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people that day? We don’t know. Would our government have done such a thing? It wouldn’t have been the first time. Before the task of waging a war comes the task of selling the war to the public. The brutality may start at the selling stage.
The distortions start there, too, and they come from foreign activists and monied interests as well as the government. Reports that another country has committed an aggressive act out of the blue (watch for scenarios involving Iran) deserve what Pearl Harbor deserved, and what the Bush administration’s attempts to link the 9/11 attacks to Iraq deserved: skepticism and investigation.
