Sixty-four years ago today, Japan launched a preemptive strike against the United States at Pearl Harbor. What they were preempting is anyone's guess, but that's the rationalization that some writers hostile to America still make. Thankfully, the Congress, at President Roosevelt's request, responded on December 8 by declaring war on Japan rather than authorizing military force on some other country in the region, say, Mongolia, that had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.

Why is it "hostile to America" to say that Japan had reasons to do what they did? No one is saying their reasons were right and noble, just that they had reasons behind the thing. It is hard to disagree that FDR's foreign policy put us in a precarious situation that boiled over. Who knew it was going to boil over first in the Pacific rather than the Atlantic? That was the surprise.

I went to the link with thoughts of boosting my Pearl Harbor Day patriotism. My reaction to the article is very well expressed in Judah's comments. I think that Burress's article is essentially even-handed in its condemnations and has the ring of truth.

Judah makes a great point that Japan had reasons, not necessarily noble, for what they did. However, I respectfully disagree with Sean O's assessment of Charles Burress' piece as "even-handed". A more extensive study of the facts and history surrounding the American/Japanese relations will reveal Mr. Burress is very selective in the presentation of his "facts", and highly misleading in his representation of specific events. To whit, there is no question that in the past, the United States acted as a colonial power. However, to equate the conduct of the U.S. in its administration of the Philipines to that of Japan with its "colonies" is a ludicrous contention, akin to Ramsey Clark equating George W. Bush with Saddam Hussein. And Mr. Burress' contention that the U.S. "planned" fire raids on Japanese civilians prior to 1941 is simply flat-out wrong.

Dan, you know I love ya' man, but are you hinting that in the event Hitler had not declared war on the U.S. subsequent to Pearl Harbor, our involvement in Europe would have been akin to the U.S. action against Iraq?

After all, neither was an "immenent" threat to the U.S., both dictators had invaded their neighbors, and both had slaughtered numerous innocent humans, both domestic and foreign. Plus, in hindsight, Germany's military ascendancy had already reached its zenith and begun a long, slow decline by the time Hitler declared war. And other than U-Boat attacks on American shipping, what reason did the U.S. have for committing troops against an enemy that couldn't harm us in the least? Granted, Nazi Germany was an odious stench in the nostrils of the world, but so was Saddam's Iraq!

"Why does America continue to nuture a deep preoccupation with Pearl Harbor, 60 years after the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii?"

Why does France continue to nuture a "deep preoccupation" with the French Revolution? Why does the UK continue to nuture the same for the London Blitz of WWII? This "deep preoccupation" - which we call "history" - is shared by every nation on earth. Every country has had pivotal moments in its history and Pearl Harbor was certainly a pivotal moment in U.S. history. To mock this by suggesting it should be forgotten - or worse, revised to make the U.S. seem the villian - almost makes my blood boil with outrage. Why does Japan continue to "nuture a deep preoccupation" with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In Burress' mind, only America's remembrance of its war dead is a "deep preoccupation."

Burress asks, "...why does Pearl Harbor in particular tower over the landscape of American war memory...?" He then goes on to malign that memory by suggesting that the Japanese were justified in attacking us because of "economic sanctions" we had imposed upon them, but he fails to explain WHY we imposed those sanctions, to begin with. Completely absent from Burress' mind is the fact the Empire of Japan had allied itself with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and was, in concert with its new allies, persuing the domination of the free world.

Japan posed a much greater and more immediate threat to the world's security in 1941 than Sadaam Hussein's regime did in the 1990s, yet, the Clinton administration had no problem with using sanctions against Iraq. It is only the left who would oppose either instance and attempt to re-write history to make America out as the bad guy. The fact is, sanctions were imposed short of going to war with Japan. It was the only way America could, at the time, participate in helping Europe to defeat the Axis powers without committing to war itself. As for whether those sanctions were deserved, surely they were. Japan was clearly behaving as an aggressor nation and had to be stopped. As history clearly shows, it would take a great deal more than mere economic sanctions to acheive that goal.

Yes, Japan "had reasons" for its attack on Pearl Harbor, but to equate Japan's "reasons" with America's reasons for its righteous indignation over Pearl Harbor is nothing more than the usual moral equivalence we've come to expect from the left.

Where's your political correctness Gary? Don't you know that in these times we live in, the need to be sensitive and caring trumps the need to be strong and sometimes ruthless every time?

Judah: Burress's claim isn't quite so tautological as 'Japan had reasons (however ignoble) for what they did.' After all, everybody has reasons for what they do, including Hitler, and Jeffrey Dahmer, Scott Peterson, and whoever else you pick. Burress's claim is that our sanctions and other treatment of Japan was unjust and rightly resented, and that it left Japan little option but war.

Anyone who has a basic understanding of History would recognize that the FDR intentionally provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor as a back door into war.

It doesn't justify what they did, but the righteous indignation that Americans still hold 60 years later is pretty ridiculous.

If any country did half of what we did to Japan today, we wouldn't hesitate to bomb them. I think Joe Sobran said it best, "A rogue nation, is a country that acts like America"

Also I wonder which is worse? The less than 2,000 Soldiers killed at Pearl Harbor or the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civillians we intentionally killed in Japan.

Marcus: What did Koreans do to "provoke" Japan into occupying them? How about the Chinese, were they looking for "a back door into war" when Japan took Manchuria? The Philippines? Vietnam? Malaysia? There's an historical context here that's hard to ignore, but I think you do so in the above post. One can debate whether Roosevelt's prewar policies were wise or unwise. Casting Japan, the clear aggressor, as the victim doesn't mesh with the facts.

I know Marcus: America bad;World good. The Japanese were sword rattling for years before PH and truly believed it was their divine path to War with and to dominate the United States in much the same way they beat the Russians (starting with a naval sneak attack similar to Pearl) and the Chinese who they brutally subjugated.

Certainly, the U.S. was not completely innocent and was complicit through oil raw materials blockades, but your argument is the same old same old that tries to pit us against the world where we're always wrong.

Remember, provoked or un-provoked, they attacked us and not the other way around.

Where am I saying that Japan was good and not an agressor or that the attacks on Pearl Harbor were justified? I am simply saying that were the tables turned, our current American government wouldn't act that differently.

I am well aware that Japan did some very bad things to other countries, but imagine if a country that was hostile to US put a warfleet in Cuba, and Bermuda and then had them make their way into US waters on multiple occasions. Placed a near total economic embargo on us. Say we were occupying a country (like Iraq) and this powerful country actively supported the nationalists in the country. Am I being unpatriotic, Jap lover for suggesting that were the tables turned the current American government would act like the Japanese did then?

No, the American Government would not have acted as the Japanese did. The imperialist Samurai culture of superiority drove the Japs to absorb land and other cultures as they went along. In a particularly brutal way.

For certain, Americans and the U.S. Government are not squeaky clean. But we do not demonstrate the kind of aggression and total disregard for human life that the Japanese did with regard to their enemies and themselves. Even before Pearl.

First of all, "imperialist samurai culture" is an oxymoron, seeing as the Samurai class were abolished by Meiji. Prior to us "opening" Japan at gunpoint, the samurai culture didn't Japanese ever leaving their country.

You are probably right that the Japanese had less regard for Human Life than the American Government, but we set the bar quite low at Dresden, Hiroshima, Hamburg, Tokyo, need I go on?

Also as for their desire to absorb other cultures, I don't disagree, but what did they call it? The Greater EAST ASIAN co-prosperity sphere. I don't know of any serious historian who thought that the Japanese had anything but local imperial ambitions, so there really was no reason to provoke them then, just as there is no reason to provoke China today.

I favor Marcus's side in the above argument.

I just want to add to ASDF that the actions the U.S. took to economically restrict Japan were themselves acts of war. Marcus illustrates this by suggesting that if the tables were turned the U.S. would have acted militarily to break the embargo. I think it is too easy for people to fail to imagine that anything other than bombing/shooting constitutes acts of war against a country.

For evidence of how the U.S. reacts to such treatment just look at Wilson's push to join WWI based on defending the concept of unrestricted shipping.

Marcus: Given the injustice of Japan's attack and your view that the US would do the same, don't you think it might be good for America to keep Pearl Harbor's infamy in mind? That is, to the extent that we lament their injustice, Americans might more naturally reject the idea of unprevoked aggression abroad.

FDR was deliberately trying to steer Japan into war as a way of opening up war with Germany. So the debate over who were the aggressors (the Japanese) and who were the victims (the Americans) still misses the point. War was not invetitable and the millions killed in firebombings, atomic blasts, and so on could have easily been avoided. And what were the benefits of all this carnage? Almost the whole earth swallowed up in Communism.

Comparing WWII to the current war in Iraq is obviously ridiculous and stupid for reasons that don't need comment.

Marcus, first, the British fire-bombed Dresden, not the U.S.

Second, the oil and scrap metal embargos placed on the Japanese by the U.S. were in direct response to Japanese atrocities and activities in China. Anyone ever hear of the Rape of Nanking? Sure war could have been avoided, but only if the Japanese would have halted their military conquests and aggression in China and Southeast Asia. Given the political realities which then existed in Japan, that is highly unlikely. Japan needed oil and other natural resources. If the U.S. wasn't going to provide them, the Japanese were going to have to take them, which meant the conquest of Indonesia, Malaysia, etc., which meant war with the U.S. To argue that by cutting off exports of our own raw materials and trade goods to a nation slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Chinese, the U.S. was somehow wrong and thus equally or even partially responsible for the Japanese initiation of war is ludicrous.

Eric, unless FDR was psychic, I'm uncertain how he saw war in the Pacific as a means of entering the war in Europe, as it was Hitler that declared war on the U.S. And sure, war WAS not inevitable. All Germany and Japan had to do was stop their military invasions of neighboring countries. If you're saying that somehow the U.S. could and should have used diplomacy to avoid the conflict, you have a naive understanding of the facts of history and the cultures of the times.

"Anyone who has a basic understanding of History would recognize that the FDR intentionally provoked Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor as a back door into war."

That may be, even though I believe the sanctions placed upon Japan by FDR were justifiable under the circumstances. Japan was clearly an aggressor, working in league with Germany and Italy to overthrow the world. In fact, FDR's pussyfooting around with sanctions cost thousands of Europeans their lives. Had the United States entered the war as an ally of Britain, France and the rest of western Europe when they were pleading for us to do so, the war would have been shortened and the total loss of life reduced. Japan might never have been capable of making a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, either, without Germany and Italy to divert America's military might.

It has also been suggested by many that FDR knew of the Pearl Harbor attack plans before they transpired and deliberately witheld that information from our forces at Pearl Harbor in order to give the U.S. a justifiable excuse for entering the war.

I might remind everyone that the declassified cable transmissions between American Soviet agents and their KGB handlers, intercepted and decoded by the NSA between 1942 and 1980 and declassified and made public in 1995 (dubbed the "Venona Project" by the NSA) clearly show FDR's complicity in allowing the Soviets to flood our government with hundreds of spies. FDR laughed off the suggestion there were spies in his own Whitehouse when Whittaker Chambers - himself a defecting Soviet spy - brought Alger Hiss' spying to FDR's attention. It was Hiss who influenced FDR to give away Eastern Europe to Stalin at the Yalta summit. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg gave away our Manhattan Project (atomic bomb) secrets to the KGB.

If FDR did ever harbored a desire for America to enter WWII, he did so as means of allying with the Soviets against the Nazis. Note that this didn't occur until after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was broken by Hitler, who felt uncomfortable with being in bed with communists.

FDR apparently had no such discomfort, though, when he made his deal with Stalin (after praising Mussolini and borrowing ideas from him for use in the formation of the National Recovery Act).

Yep, I know that's a lot to consider all at once, but take your time and think about it.

Tom, the Tripartite Pact.

Thom,

Give me a break. The Rape of Nanking was in 1937 when the United States was still supplying raw materials to Japan. Why did the FDR regime not develop a conscience until 1941?