12-07-05, 9:25 am
It is the sixty-fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor attack and some scholars are trying to revive the old right-wing 'isolationist' arguments that the Roosevelt administration knew about the attacks and let them happen to get the U.S. into the war.
Although there has even been a sensationalist program on the History Channel which gave this view some credence (for its commercial value, I think, given the Channel’s emphasis on war, war, cars, and more war,) most scholars and students are still not taking this view seriously.
Ironically, the recent exposes of Bush administration distortions of intelligence to September 11 attacks gives Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists some space to maneuver. In essence, this is like the Bush administration itself profiting politically from the September 11 attack for which it and its ideological forebears, the Reagan and Bush I administrations have clear responsibility.
When I was a boy, the New York Daily News, then a rabid rightwing, Roosevelt hating newspaper came into my house, although my dear mother, who never voted for a Republican in her life, told me plaintively that 'I don't read that page,' meaning the editorial page. Every year, although FDR had been dead for many years, there were always two standard editorials. One on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, blaming him for the attack, and one on April 12, the anniversary of his death, blaming him for 'handing over' Eastern Europe to his political soul mates in Moscow.
Most of the new' scholarship' on Pearl Harbor, reflects the old Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News view (the contemporary analogy might be Fox News-New York Post) by using footnoted innuendoes and conjectures, often drawn from scraps of documents that appeared in military and state department hands, to string together the old conspiracy theory.
It complements the 'new scholarship' that professional anti-Communists in academic positions have launched by scavenging materials from former Soviet intelligence agencies (with the assistance of 'new Russian' translators) to reduce the history of the Communist movement globally and the CPUSA specifically to a diabolical Kremlin-controlled conspiracy to steal state secrets and use them to advance Soviet world domination. This is history in the style of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie written by Joseph Goebbells
But how can we get to the truth about Pearl Harbor. Roberta Wohlstetter's classic study, which dealt with U.S intelligence and how it was interpreted, remains the most valuable I think in understanding what happened, however later released documents may encourage some writers to see it as dated.
First, Roosevelt wasn't overseeing the intelligence materials that were pouring in from various sources, including those from the Japanese Navy that the code breakers were decoding with their MAGIC machines. These documents, particularly the decoded ones, aren't exactly like the Watergate tapes. They aren’t filled with clear information, but provide many, often contradictory leads, some of which led to Pearl Harbor but many others to other targets.
That the U.S. knew that an attack was coming somewhere in early December (not necessarily against U.S. targets, but an attack--against British possessions, Indonesia, the U.S. Philippines, or Pearl Harbor) is indisputable. Even by the broadest interpretation of the rules of evidence that historians use, whatever their interpretive and analytical differences, the rightwing conspiracy theorists remotely come close to meeting the burden proof that the administration was aware of the specific attack before it came and chose not to respond.
The enormity of the data pouring in to many U.S. sources, the lack of an effective center to sift and analyze that data, is, as Roberta Wohlstetter and others argued decades ago and no one in my opinion has effectively challenged, the key to understanding the intelligence disaster that Pearl Harbor represented. That and, I would add personally, an attitude in military circles that the Japanese would never dare directly attack the U.S. but would strike at Britain to put the onus of war on the U.S. Some of this reflected a racist arrogance toward the Japanese—that is, that they would never dare attack the U.S. directly, even though they had thirty-seven years earlier attacked the Czarist Russian fleet in the Pacific at the beginning of their successful Russo-Japanese War.
We know that Harry Hopkins suggested to Roosevelt that the U.S. launch a first strike. Roosevelt did not support such a view because it meant that the U.S. would start the war (which to me has always meant that he shared the dominant view that the attack would come against non-U.S. targets and the Philippines, which the U.S. was in no position to defend).
It is also unclear if a U.S. first strike would have prevented the Japanese from carrying out the Pearl Harbor attack.
It might be interesting to turn the tables on contemporary right-wing Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists by comparing the Pearl Harbor intelligence, before the U.S. had a global intelligence agency, spy satellites, and spent less on the whole budget than it spends on intelligence related matters today with the Bush administration's handling of the intelligence leading to the World Trade Center attacks and its subsequent handling of intelligence that provided the rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In the latter case, there was a whole agency (NSA) spending a huge amount of money to decode and analyze vast amounts of materials, enormous computer systems which did not exist in 1941 to sift the materials, the CIA and its allied intelligence agencies with a huge number of sources, including former members of Al Qaeda, infiltrators in groups allied to it, etc.
The result in 2001 was a disaster far more inexcusable than Pearl Harbor, given that this was carried out on the soil of the continental United States by mostly Saudi citizens who in many cases received training in U.S. private flying schools where their money payments meant more than the fact that they didn't even return to finish their lessons in how to land the planes!
Incredibly, few have raised the point that attack was an unintended consequence of the anti-regulatory stance of the federal government and governments generally since the Reagan era. Also, few raised the point that forty-nine years after the passage of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act (which was used widely to bar individuals, many of them distinguished in the arts, sciences and professions, from entering Communist parties), individuals were able to use U.S. private commercial facilities without any checks because they were from 'allied' countries and had all of the money they needed.
The result also (and I am not saying at all that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, knew that the attacks were coming, as right-wing conspiracy theorists say about Roosevelt) has been a politically self-serving and reckless set of policies which four years later has greatly weakened the country by involving it in an invasion against a regime and a country which it wanted to attack, but which no credible source outside its circles and those who it could influence politically believed had anything to do with those who launched the attack.
As a result, the Al Qaeda group, itself the Frankenstein monster of Reagan Bush I policies in Afghanistan, has in itself regrouped, entered Iraq and become a force there killing Iraqis and Americans, and continued to pose a threat to the United States. The Pearl Harbor attack brought the U.S. into WWII. The New Deal government was already providing extensive aid to the UK and the USSR against fierce rightwing, mostly Republican and pro-fascist 'isolationist' opposition and fighting an undeclared naval war with Nazi Germany to keeps that aid flowing. The New Deal government and the Center-Left political coalition that supported with the CPUSA the clear leading force on the left, then fought the war very successfully, maximizing U.S. influence though military production and minimizing U.S. casualties compared to all of the other major powers involved in the war.
It did not do what a rightwing administration similar to the present Bush administration might have done – launch an attack against a third party, Brazil let's say, whom it accused of working with the Japanese on fraudulent intelligence material and then send the U.S. forces to fight and occupy Brazil while the real Axis nations, Hitler Germany and Imperial Japan, grew stronger.
It did not use the war to expand the political power of the New Deal (which some of us might have wanted it to) but brought in businessmen and other traditional opponents of the administration in spite of left opposition on a win the war policy. It certainly did not use the war to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy on the grounds that this would trickle down to produce a more effective war effort, but established the greatly increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy, policies that the Reagan and Bush II administrations have all but dismantled while they have raised military spending to unimagined heights and created in the process a federal deficit more than six times as great as it was when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 The New Deal government and its allies in labor and the left mobilized the nation to fight a serious and necessary war with major allies and contributed hugely to the eventual victory against a military alliance of two of the most powerful nations on earth. While the administration yielded in an unconscionable manner to reactionary political and military forces who fomented hysteria against Japanese Americans and carried out the 'evacuation' of these citizens to brutal detention camps, its overall civil liberties record as it affected the great majority of citizens, including its right-wing isolationist enemies, who continued to criticize it and even launched in Congress investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack, was very positive.
The September 11 attack on and destruction of the World Trade Center provided the Bush administration with an opportunity to enact its domestic and international programs, profiting politically from the disaster and subsequently sorting and distorting intelligence concerning Iraq to justify its invasion. U.S. intelligence, code breaking on the battle of Midway and other aspects of the war against Japan and Germany and OSS activities in the European theater made a significant contribution to the eventual victory. U.S. intelligence has been used by the present administration to provide domestic and international propaganda for its actions, and internationally, very few believe anything it says any more (many millions of Americans have also come to that conclusion). As we remember Pearl Harbor and 1941 today, we should also remember the great victory over fascism, racism and colonialism that the world saw four years later in 1945. We should compare it with the September 11, 2001 attacks and what we see today in 2005, a nation and a people who have seen their real wages decline, more than 2,000 of their fellow citizens killed and tens of thousands wounded in a disastrous and, in regard to the 'war on terrorism,' counter-productive invasion and occupation, and an administration whose only talent is to proclaim every defeat an incipient victory as it goes from defeat to defeat. It would be a terrible shame if the present widespread distrust of the Bush administration’s distortion of intelligence would somehow be used to revive the old right-wing isolationist mythology about the Pearl Harbor attack, especially since the world-view of the Bush administration, in its unilateralist approach to foreign policy and, I would say, its either/or view that the U.S. can either enforce its will on the world or withdraw from the world, dovetails nicely with those who hated the New Deal and blamed for Pearl Harbor and Yalta and in the cold war period attributed its actions to its socialist leanings and/or the role of Communist 'spies' in its midst.
I guess the propagandists of the right, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and Hoover Institution 'fellows' if they deigned to read this article, would respond by saying that no one, even J. Edgar Hoover, would accuse the Bush administration of being manipulated by 'Communist agents.' Actually, the anti-Bush opposition and the American people have need of many more Communist activists (not 'agents') if it is to get rid this 'regime' and undo the enormous damage that it and its predecessors have done to the people of the U.S. and the world – that is, their demonizing of 'welfare' rather than poverty, their consistent support of Robber Baron capitalism was the solution rather than itself the problem that working people face here and abroad, and their consistent implementation of militarist anti-labor, anti-social welfare policies through every venue, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, NATO, the US Congress, in which they have any power.
--Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
