This is the third essay in a series: Condemned to Repeat It: Myths and Lessons of the 20th Century.  The previous essays addressed Die Dolchstoßlegende and the decisions that led to Stalingrad.  The series is based on George Santayana's axiom:

Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.

December 7, 1941.

September 11, 2001.

The dates are imprinted on our public consciousness.  They are, to paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous speech to Congress on 8 December 1941, "days that will live in infamy," two "unprovoked, dastardly attacks" that plunged the United States into war.

The dates have been cited in tandem so often that it is taken as a given that 9/11 mirrors Pearl Harbor.  Perhaps that is true.  If so, the story of 9/11 is very different from the common beliefs.  Because our understanding of Pearl Harbor is mostly myth.

The popular wisdom about Pearl Harbor is the U.S. sought to avoid World War II, but that we had no choice after Japan launched an unprovoked attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii.  They struck first, and all that followed -- from Midway and Guadalcanal through the atomic bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- was an innocent, aggrieved democracy acting in self-defense against a treacherous, totalitarian empire.

The facts are quite different.

U.S. engagement in East Asia began in the 1840s, when the famed "China Clippers" began to ply the Pacific and compete with the British for the lucrative Chinese trade markets.  We and the British shared a common quest over the next century.  We were industrialized economies where, in the words of a U.S. newspaper editorial, "farmers grow more than we can eat and factories produce more than we can consume."  Both countries needed markets in which to sell their surplus.  And both saw the answer in China.

China was at the time a crumbling empire.  We now think of China as a monolith, but for much of her long history she was a collection of warlord-led tribes held in check by a series of imperial dynasties.  During the mid-19th century, the empire began to fracture.  When India's poppy production flourished, the British decided to sell opium in China where, it was believed, drug addiction would not make much difference in a "primitive" people.  The Emperor outlawed that trade, and the British Army intervened in what became known as the Opium Wars.  British troops crushed their Chinese opposition and forced the Emperor to permit the import of opium.  The warlords saw this as exposing the essential weakness of the Emperor, and over the next 50 years began to assert increasing control over their tribal regions.

For the United States, a market-driven China policy was given a moral gloss by the introduction of Christian missionaries.  While Wall Street spoke of the potential for huge profits to be made, Main Street saw China as a sea of imperiled souls to be saved.  Once the U.S. conquest of the west was completed in the late 19th century, expansionist eyes increasingly looked across the Pacific for new territory to be claimed in the name of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity.  For avowed imperialists like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt, there was no choice.  Roosevelt believed that a nation which stops expanding becomes "morally feeble."  Mahan, a naval strategist whose writings still dominate our views of sea power, said that "war is the handmaiden of commerce," and believed that a powerful navy should serve as Roosevelt's "big stick" to ensure access to foreign markets.

Japan was in the mid-19th century a truly insular nation, not only in her geography but also in her self-imposed cultural and economic isolation under the Shogunate.  That isolation ended in 1854 with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, who forced open the door to Japanese markets.  Over the next 80 years, much to the dismay of the "China lobby," Japan replaced China as the principal foreign market for U.S. goods.  The rapid industrialization of Japan collapsed the Shogunate, replaced by a British-style parliamentary democracy under a restored emperor.  But internal political and economic frictions made Japanese democracy highly unstable.  It was for decades a system of "government by assassination," where cabinet ministers who ran afoul of military or business cartels were unseated by bullets rather than ballots.

Japanese industrialization brought two additional pressures on the China Equation.  The first of these was Japan's population explosion -- common among all industrializing powers in the 19th century -- and with it a demand for food which outstripped her agricultural capacity.  The second was a demand for energy, both coal and oil, to power her factories, light her cities, and fuel her railways and fleets.  Japan's annexation of Korea at the end of the 19th Century was an attempt to secure more farmland, but Korea could not supply the coal and oil.  For oil, Japan relied on U.S. exports.  For coal, Japan looked to Manchuria, a Chinese province on the border of Russia, where central Chinese rule was all but non-existent.  After her decisive victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japanese nationalists felt she had won and was entitled to a first-among-equals position in East Asia, and especially in China.

What followed were thirty years of negotiation and frustration, as the U.S. and Britain insisted on the so-called "Open Door Policy" in China, while Japan sought to impose a "Japanese Monroe Doctrine."  The threat of a prohibitively expensive naval arms race gave rise to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1925.  The United States and Britain, arguing that their two-ocean commitments exceeded Japan's, forced the Japanese to accept second-power status under the famed "5-5-3" ratio of capital ships.  For Japanese nationalists and naval strategists like Yamamoto, this was a diplomatic humiliation.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Empire collapsed.  As tribal warlords vied for local control, two centralizing movements emerged: the Nationalists under Chaing Kai-Shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong.  Their battle for dominance would continue almost unabated until 1949, when Mao drove Chaing from the mainland and established the People's Republic of China under communist rule.  During this civil war, China was virtually a political vacuum.

While U.S. investors generally avoided China -- judging the political situation too unstable for guaranteed profit-taking despite their insistence on maintaining the "Open Door Policy" -- Japanese nationalists saw China as ripe for the picking.  This situation was aggravated by the Great Depression, which forced drastic cuts in U.S. naval spending.  The handful of U.S. gunboats plying the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers were barely able to protect U.S. businesses and missions from marauding warlords, and offered no deterrent whatever to a modern, efficient Japanese military.

By 1931, with Japan's industries and population outstripping her agricultural and energy resources, there seemed only one alternative.  Japanese generals, without prior approval from the government, moved into Manchuria under the pretext of protecting the Japanese-built railroad that supplied much of her coal.  The installation of the puppet state of Manchuoko in the Manchuria Province triggered a diplomatic crisis with the west, and especially the United States.

Already unpopular on Wall Street because of his "New Deal," but lacking the funds to build an adequate navy, and politically dependent on the isolationist America First Movement, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in a tightening political box over China.  To abandon the "Open Door Policy" and accede to a Japanese "Monroe Doctrine" would further galvanize opposition from the business community.  But he could not hold that "Chinese Door" open by military force unless he could first silence his America First critics.

When the Japanese army moved south out of Manchuoko in 1937, capturing most of northern China including the Nationalist capital at Nanking, Roosevelt knew the United States and Japan were set on a course to war.  The horrific images from "Rape of Nanking" helped to galvanize public opinion, and there emerged a slender popular majority in support of using military force to guarantee U.S. interests in China.  But the larger war was looming in Europe, against Hitler's Nazi regime.  Roosevelt knew that if the U.S. went to war, it would have to be under a "Germany first" strategy.  And there was very little popular support for that war, even after the German conquests of Poland, Scandanavia, and northwest Europe in 1939-40.

The principal question from 1937-1941, then, was how to goad the Japanese into attacking the United States.  A series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions were imposed, coupled by strident public denunciations, but lacking any effective military enforcement or deterrent.  This absence of a military deterrent was partially reflective our military unpreparedness, but it was also a calculated gambit.  It was bait.

The U.S. embargo on oil exports to Japan -- the U.S. was at the time the world's principal oil exporter and Japan's almost sole provider -- was the final jerk of the economic noose.  With stockpiles of less than two years, Japanese leaders knew her economy and her military would grind to a halt by 1942 if she could not secure another source for oil.

The only practicable sources were the British and Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).  The Dutch East Indies were an especially attractive target, as the Dutch government was in exile (Holland was by then under Nazi occupation).  With the British fleet focused largely on guarding her sea lanes in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and with a newly-signed non-aggression treaty with Russia, Japan's only worry was the U.S. Pacific Fleet.  She did not know whether the U.S. would go to war to protect European colonies in the south Pacific -- and there were many in the FDR Administration who argued against doing so -- but she could not take the chance that we might.

Therein lay the seeds of Pearl Harbor.

Revisionist arguments that FDR knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked are overstating the case.  It is a matter of record that FDR knew and was waiting for a Japanese attack somewhere, but he and others in government believed the attack would most likely come in the Philippines and/or the U.S.-held islands of Guam and Midway.  It is likewise a matter of record that FDR was determined that the Japanese should strike the first blow.  But there is no evidence that FDR or the U.S. government knew the specifics of the planned Japanese offensives of 7-8 December 1941.

Once the Japanese attack came and the U.S. declared war on Japan, FDR knew from intercepted Japanese diplomatic cables that Hitler had pledged to declare war on the U.S.  Under the terms of the Tripartite Agreement, Hitler was not obligated to declare war on the U.S. if Japan were the aggressor.  He had, however, committed to doing so.  Thus, the Japanese attack would allow the U.S. to join the war in Europe.

It was simply a matter of waiting for the attack to come, and using it to galvanize public opinion behind a pre-determined course for war.

Thus, the attack on Pearl Harbor was not "unprovoked."  While FDR certainly did not hope for that level of devastation, he had guided the U.S. on a policy of provocation for the past five years, waiting for the Japanese to "start" the war that public opinion would not otherwise support.

If 9/11 mirrors Pearl Harbor, it does so mostly in the chilling assessments in the article Rebuilding America's Defenses, published by the Project for a New American Century.

This article calls for the establishment of a permanent U.S. military presence in southeastern Europe (along the route of the Trans-Balkan Pipeline) and southwest Asia (the Middle East oil fields).  PNAC saw these bases as necessary if the United States were to preserve what it calls a Pax Americana, where the U.S. dominates global politics through the 21st century by controlling the world's access to energy resources.  That those resources are not territorially "ours" to control is irrelevant in the PNAC strategy, as the U.S. has an "inherent moral duty" to spread democracy and free-market capitalism throughout the world.

The PNAC writers recognized that this strategy reeked of raw imperialism.  In the wake of the Cold War, the American people wanted to demilitarize and reap the "peace dividend," rebuilding crumbling roads, bridges, and schools, revitalizing our infrastructure, even funding universal health care.  With the "Soviet Menace" now absent and no comparable enemy on the horizon, there was little support for continuing $200 billion defense budgets in the face of so many domestic needs.

Changing that public opinion, the PNAC writers said, would require "a new Pearl Harbor."  Both the first Bush and Clinton Administrations undertook a policy of goading Islamic fundamentalism:  using the first Gulf War as an opportunity to install permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, alternately engaging and then rebuffing Islamic voices, dealing with Saudi businesses whom we knew were funding militant groups -- and indeed funding those groups when their activities served our purposes -- all the while denouncing them as "terrorists."

Therein lay the seeds of 9/11.

Again, conspiracy theorists who charge that Bush the neoconservatives knew 9/11 was in the works -- or indeed planned it -- are overstating the case.  The evidence suggests there was ample reason to know Islamic militants would strike somewhere in the United States; they had already struck the World Trade Center in 1992, and the escalating attacks in Africa and the Persian Gulf region were clear evidence of their hatred of U.S. policy.  But there is as yet no evidence to suggest that Bush or the U.S. government knew the specifics of the 9/11 operation.

It was simply a matter of waiting for the attack to come, and using it to galvanize public opinion behind a pre-determined course for war.

Thus, 9/11 was no more "unprovoked" than was Pearl Harbor.  While Bush and the neocons certainly did not hope for that level of devastation, the United States had been pursuing a policy of provocation, waiting for Al Qaeda or some similar group to "start" a war that public opinion would not otherwise support.

It now appears the same pattern is emerging in Iran.

Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.

Crissie