Re: Obama 6(...66)
There was plenty of intelligence that the Japanese were up to something. Like the fact that the staff of their consulate in Honolulu had increased tremendously in the months prior to the attack. But we didn't have a CIA in those days and no mechanism for assembling what we knew to get a broader picture of Japanese intent.
It's always much clearer after a horrible event to say why didn't someone see this coming? Why weren't there enough lifeboats on the Titanic? Seems a reasonable question after April 15, but nobody was asking it before.
So I'm not disagreeing with you that there was a lot of information out there. I am disagreeing with the idea that on Sunday, Dec 7th, FDR was sitting in the oval waiting for confirmation of an attack he knew was going to happen. And not everyone who believes that is a wingnut. Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland (one of my favorites ) wrote a book called Infamy in which he makes that claim. *
The heart of any conspiracy theory is the inference of subjective motivation from objective result. Something bad happened, therefore it happened because somebody made it happen or at least looked the other way to allow it to happen. However, I completely agree with you about being prepared for an attack--all the time. In the Russo Japanese war the Russians complained that the Japanese had attacked them without warning (hmmmm, where have I heard that before). The New York Times editorialized that the existence of a far flung military outpost presupposes the need to defend it--same is true of Pearl Harbor and any US military outpost today.
So, yes, we were fat dumb and stupid in the run up to Pearl Harbor, that's not the issue. The issue is FDR's complicity. And the evidence there is non existent.
*The right wingers I referred to were whipped into a frenzy by Colonel McCormak's Chicago Tribune and it's chief foreign affairs writer Walter Trohan.
It's not so much a right/left thing these days.
There was plenty of intelligence that the Japanese were up to something. Like the fact that the staff of their consulate in Honolulu had increased tremendously in the months prior to the attack. But we didn't have a CIA in those days and no mechanism for assembling what we knew to get a broader picture of Japanese intent.
It's always much clearer after a horrible event to say why didn't someone see this coming? Why weren't there enough lifeboats on the Titanic? Seems a reasonable question after April 15, but nobody was asking it before.
So I'm not disagreeing with you that there was a lot of information out there. I am disagreeing with the idea that on Sunday, Dec 7th, FDR was sitting in the oval waiting for confirmation of an attack he knew was going to happen. And not everyone who believes that is a wingnut. Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland (one of my favorites ) wrote a book called Infamy in which he makes that claim. *
The heart of any conspiracy theory is the inference of subjective motivation from objective result. Something bad happened, therefore it happened because somebody made it happen or at least looked the other way to allow it to happen. However, I completely agree with you about being prepared for an attack--all the time. In the Russo Japanese war the Russians complained that the Japanese had attacked them without warning (hmmmm, where have I heard that before). The New York Times editorialized that the existence of a far flung military outpost presupposes the need to defend it--same is true of Pearl Harbor and any US military outpost today.
So, yes, we were fat dumb and stupid in the run up to Pearl Harbor, that's not the issue. The issue is FDR's complicity. And the evidence there is non existent.
*The right wingers I referred to were whipped into a frenzy by Colonel McCormak's Chicago Tribune and it's chief foreign affairs writer Walter Trohan.
It's not so much a right/left thing these days.
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