6

“PEARL HARBOR”
AS GODSEND

Political and ideological code words often swing on a two-way hinge. For most Americans, “Pearl Harbor” calls to mind infamy, vulnerability, drastic failure of military intelligence, rage, and revenge. It is code for wars of choice, and for aggression that ricochets against the aggressor. At the same time, however, December 7, 1941, was also a political godsend for President Roosevelt—much as September 11 proved to be a windfall for President Bush. Near the end of Bush’s second term, his longtime éminence grise Karl Rove obliquely acknowledged this. “History has a funny way of deciding things,” Rove told an audience of university students. “Sometimes history sends you things, and 9/11 came our way.”188

As godsend, “Pearl Harbor” signifies a traumatic incident that, however terrible in itself, may open the gate to enactment of desired but hitherto thwarted policies. By much the same measure, the Pearl Harbor code also is a potent scare word that can be exploited to promote draconian military change in the name of both self-preservation and assertive offensive capabilities and policies. Both the godsend and the scare word were imbedded in the geopolitical agenda that the Bush administration embraced.

The perception that, for all its horrors, December 7 was also a blessing did not come as delayed hindsight. On the contrary, the positive impact of the Japanese attack was emphasized immediately by a range of American commentators. The New York Herald Tribune captured this sentiment in its December 8 editorial: “Since the clash now appears to have been inevitable, its occurrence brings with it a sense of relief. The air is clearer. Americans can get down to their task with old controversies forgotten.” Newspapers in Chicago joined the chorus. “Thanks now to Japan, the deep division of opinion that has rent and paralyzed our country will be swiftly healed,” the Chicago Daily News proclaimed. “It cannot be otherwise. Once more we shall be a united people, firm in a single determination—to maintain our liberties by the complete and utter defeat of our foes.” The Chicago Herald-American celebrated the fact that “we are all Americans now, united and strong and invincible,” while the Chicago Times rejoiced that “already the bitterest isolationists have announced their unswerving support of the Nation’s defense.”

These references to deep divisions pertained to bitter foreign-policy disputes pitting “America First” isolationists against a more interventionist Democratic administration. And in the Capitol, too, December 7 dispelled this tension. Politicians filled the Congressional Record with short statements along the lines of “America has been a sleeping giant. This attack by the Japanese has awakened us. We are no longer divided. We are one people.” The Washington News echoed this in an editorial on December 8 that began by quoting Kipling about “the drumming guns that have no doubts” and proceeded to celebrate the fact that “many problems have been solved on a Sabbath day. Chief of these is the problem of national unity. . . . America now turns, as Kipling said, ‘a keen, untroubled face home, to the instant need of things.’ ” The attack on Hawaii, the News went on, “united America in a common horror and in a common resolve—a unity as grim and complete as if Japan had struck individually at 180,000,000 Americans. She has thereby eliminated our chief dangers—indifference and division.”189

In time, as the war drew near closure in 1944 and early 1945, political and ideological feuding resumed and the “old controversies” were resurrected. Remembering Pearl Harbor became a trigger for fractiousness rather than unity, as conservatives reassessed December 7 as a catastrophe that simply enabled Roosevelt to do what he desired: take the nation into war against the Axis powers, particularly the German juggernaut that had engulfed Europe and threatened England. In its severest form, this “backdoor to war” argument accused the Democratic president and his aides of conspiring to invite Japan’s attack. As more and more of the backstage record became accessible, the argument gained legs in Republican and conservative circles. This is a controversy that will not go away.

Among the pieces of purported evidence that the Roosevelt administration desired war is a diary entry Secretary of War Stimson made on November 25, one day before an “ultimatum” to the Japanese by Secretary of State Hull effectively ended the efforts of the two nations to reach some sort of diplomatic resolution of their differences. Referring to a meeting held at noon that day, Stimson recorded that Roosevelt “brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” Two days later, the War Department sent a cable to MacArthur in the Philippines reflecting the same sentiment:

Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only barest possibilities that Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue period Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment period If hostilities cannot comma repeat cannot comma be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act period.190

Much of this secret record was introduced in the joint congressional investigation conducted immediately after the war. The majority report that came out of these hearings (endorsed by eight committee members) did chastise the leadership in Washington for failing to communicate adequately with army and navy commanders in Hawaii. It went on to emphasize, however, that “the committee had found no evidence to support the charges, made before and during the hearings, that the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, or the Secretary of Navy tricked, provoked, incited, cajoled, or coerced Japan into attacking this Nation in order that a declaration of war might be more easily obtained from the Congress. On the contrary, all evidence conclusively points to the fact that they discharged their responsibilities with distinction, ability, and foresight and in keeping with the highest traditions of our fundamental foreign policy.” The majority’s criticism focused on how “the Hawaiian commands failed.”191

This gingerly treatment of top leaders foreshadowed the failure of the 9-11 Commission to address leadership delinquency on the part of the Bush administration prior to September 11. And it did not go unchallenged. The minority report (by Republican Senators Homer Ferguson and Owen Brewster) also called attention to the failures of Admiral Kimmel and General Short in Hawaii, but leveled its harshest criticism against Roosevelt and his “war cabinet”: Secretary of State Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, General and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark, and Major General Leonard Gerow, the assistant chief of staff of the War Plans Division. Although the dissenting senators paid particular attention to intercepted Japanese cables and top-level deliberations in the ten days or so that preceded the surprise attack (following the November 26 ultimatum), they went so far as to argue that “the possibility, indeed the probability of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had entered into the calculations of high authorities in Washington and the commanders at Pearl Harbor for years, months, and days before December 7.”

This picture of Roosevelt and his aides poring over intercepted Japanese messages and anticipating imminent hostilities poses a sharp contrast to the Bush administration’s disengagement from intelligence warnings about Al Qaeda. That U.S. leaders knew Japan was poised to commence “hostile action” is indisputable, and their failure to ensure the military was thoroughly briefed and prepared for this eventuality is inexcusable. To argue as the minority report did that “the probability of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor” had long been clear to Roosevelt and his advisers, however, is another matter entirely. Military planners had conducted war games predicated on such an attack for many years; alerts were issued in Hawaii on several occasions in 1941; but the prevailing mindset remained that of Admiral Kimmel: no one really took seriously the possibility that the little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an audacious operation so far from home. It was not Japan’s war of choice that was a surprise, but rather the fact that their war plans actually included Hawaii.

Whether the United States and Japan could have worked out their differences is a serious issue, for it raises questions about both the causes of war and the perils of appeasement. But the backdoor-to-war conspiracy thesis does not hold water well. If leaders in Washington had known that Pearl Harbor was targeted, there was no reason for them to let the Pacific Fleet be attacked. They could, and surely would, simply have ordered the commanders in Hawaii to take preemptive action against the advancing attack force. The casus belli would have been persuasive enough to persuade most isolationists to support retaliation against the Axis powers collectively, and the nation would have rallied behind the president—although it would not have remembered Pearl Harbor in the same searing way. In this alternative scenario, there would have been no humiliating intelligence failure and no trauma of innocence betrayed comparable to what did take place—but the rousing “date which will live in infamy” and “Remember Pearl Harbor” rhetoric would not have been entirely absent. Roosevelt still would have had his godsend: his united citizenry and good war against the Axis menace.192

IN 2001, THERE was no anticipation of an impeding Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil on the part of the president and his key advisers, although there should have been. CIA leaders tried in vain to impress National Security Adviser Rice with the urgency of the Al Qaeda threat in the opening days of July, and Bush received the soon-notorious secret President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” a month later, on August 6.193 However one may interpret the administration’s failure to respond to these warnings (the president spent most of that August at his ranch in Texas), the attack proved a double godsend.

First, 9-11 rescued a first-term presidency that had begun in disarray. The presidential election of November 2000 ended in virtual stalemate, with slightly more than half the popular vote going to the Democrat’s candidate (Al Gore) and contested electoral returns (and the decisive Electoral College vote) in Florida being decided in Bush’s favor only after controversial intervention by the Supreme Court. The September 11 attacks thus came as a boon for a presidency that lacked a clear mandate and rested on shaky ground. Like Roosevelt before him, Bush donned the mantle of a president at war and pulled a fractured body politic solidly behind him. His rating in opinion polls soared at one early point to a remarkable 90 percent, and the lingering aura of being an unwavering war leader sufficed to carry him to a second term, even after the war in Iraq had become, in the eyes of most of the world, a disaster.

Second, and less well known to the general public at the time, 9-11 enabled the conservatives who served as the president’s key advisers to put into effect a radical foreign and military policy they had advocated since before the 2000 election. Among other recommendations, this called for major increases in the defense budget, across-the-board transformation of the armed forces to exploit “the revolution in military affairs,” repositioning of U.S. forces abroad, removing Saddam Hussein from power, and asserting the political leadership of the United States rather than the United Nations in international peacekeeping.

These proposals, long in gestation, were formulated most concisely by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an exceptionally articulate lobby founded in 1997. They were itemized in a PNAC report titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, which was released in September 2000, shortly before the presidential election. Support for such drastic escalation of the military agenda could not be expected to come all at once, the report noted in a chapter titled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force.” Thus:

the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.

Almost exactly one year later, this is what they got. September 11 was the “new Pearl Harbor” that enabled President Bush to take the nation in a desired military direction. This, rather than any serious intelligence information linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, is why the president and those who now had greatest influence on U.S. military policy—led by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, all of whom had signed the PNAC report—diverted the focus of attention and hostility from Al Qaeda to Iraq without a moment’s hesitation. The “catastrophic and catalyzing event” had occurred, and they were primed to take it in predetermined directions.194

While both Roosevelt and Bush played domestic politics adroitly, however, the latter differed from his predecessor in notable ways. For one, he was incurious to the point of psychological aversion when it came to detailed knowledge about the outside world, and even about the actual on-the-ground situation in his chosen battlefields. He and his inner circle also chose to exploit fear itself as a political windfall—to strengthen his and the Republican Party’s control of domestic politics by never failing to emphasize the imminent threat of catastrophe, and how any criticism of the administration’s response to this placed the nation in peril. There was a great deal of political (and personal) opportunism in these scare tactics—but also a deep current of genuine, abiding, almost paranoid fright. By contrast, one of Roosevelt’s most remembered statements to the American people was that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Although he said this in the depth of the Great Depression in 1933, in the opening sentences of his first inaugural address, it set the tone for his successive administrations and later war leadership.

History surely will take special note of the Bush administration’s fearmongering, particularly as this played out in the Iraq war and the abuses of law that accompanied the war on terror in general. An administration that went to war trumpeting its humanitarian mission to liberate Saddam Hussein’s “republic of fear” ended up strengthening the forces of instability and terror around the world and turning America itself into a republic riddled with fear and an economy where enormous fortunes were made by ensuring that fear stayed center stage. Nor was this confined to home consumption. A disenchanted State Department participant in the administration’s high-level deliberations (Richard Armitage) was later quoted as observing that “since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear.”195

IN THIS MILIEU of unremitting insecurity and panic, the “new Pearl Harbor” did not just open the door to war against Saddam Hussein. It was a godsend, more broadly, for those who advocated directing vastly greater resources to the enhancement of sophisticated military hardware. This extended to a revised agenda for nuclear weapons as well as a grand vision of militarizing outer space.

This, too, was foreshadowed in the PNAC report, which called for resuming nuclear testing and developing “a new family of nuclear weapons” including bunker busters capable of destroying deep underground facilities. The PNAC strategists also gave particularly strong emphasis to the need to control the new “international commons” of space and cyberspace, and to this end even proposed creating a military service tentatively titled “U.S. Space Forces.”

Militarizing outer space was President Ronald Reagan’s old “Star Wars” agenda, which took its nickname from the 1977 Hollywood film that also provided Reagan with the “evil empire” label he attached to the Soviet Union. Pentagon planners had devoted increasing attention to controlling real and virtual space since the revolution in communications technology took off in the 1980s, and this preoccupation was accelerated by the role of electronic warfare in the first Gulf War. These projections, like all others, rested on the assumption of America’s unique role as a force for good—not merely in the world, but in the heavens as well. Although the military might of the United States was roughly equivalent to that of the major nations of the rest of the world combined, it was argued that the country was still vulnerable. And the code for such vulnerability—even in outer space—was again Pearl Harbor.

This emerged explicitly in a report submitted to Congress on January 11, 2001—just before Bush’s inauguration, and precisely nine months before 9-11—by the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization. The commission was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld from its inception until his nomination as secretary of defense a few weeks before the report was released. Rumsfeld’s committee warned not once or twice but six times of the danger of a “Space Pearl Harbor” if the United States did not hasten to consolidate its control over space. One version of the drumbeat warning was this:

The question is whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—a “Space Pearl Harbor”—will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.196

Language was adroitly manipulated in these visions of new frontiers and new challenges in warfare—”space control,” for example, was an oblique way of repudiating “arms control”—and September 11 paved the way for accelerated planning for both new uses of nuclear weapons and establishing control of outer space. Thus, in early January of 2002, three weeks before Bush introduced the “axis of evil” notion in his first State of the Union address, the Pentagon released lengthy excerpts from a classified Nuclear Posture Review that posited possible use of nuclear weapons in “immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies” involving North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and China (particularly in a “military confrontation over the status of Taiwan”). The review called for giving serious consideration to whether the United States should “develop an entirely new [nuclear] capability—one that is not a modification of an existing weapon.” It endorsed undertaking “new missions” such as using nuclear weapons to penetrate and destroy “hard and deeply-buried targets” (HDBTs) like underground bunkers, command centers, and biological and chemical weapons facilities. And it frankly observed that to maintain the nuclear stockpile and develop new capabilities, continuing to adhere to a moratorium on nuclear testing (observed since 1992) “may not be possible for the indefinite future.”197

The “Space Pearl Harbor” mindset found striking expression in October 2003, when the administration’s ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made the centrality of satellites, drones, and the like in U.S. high-tech warfare clear even to the general public. On this occasion, the Air Force Space Command issued a twenty-five-year “strategic master plan” bristling with expressions that made previous projections seem almost restrained by comparison: “ownership” of the new “high ground” of space; “full spectrum space command”; optimal capability to “control space and ensure Space Superiority”; dedication to the mission of deterring adversaries by continuing “to pursue lethal or nonlethal effects such as the use of deception, disruption, denial, degradation, and destruction of space capabilities”; and so on. This master plan coincided with a moment in the Iraq war when early overconfidence about a swift “shock and awe” victory was giving way to premonitions of a long and brutal slog; and the militancy of the language was so provocative that it had to be tempered in subsequent published plans.198

LIKE THE CULT of secrecy and the labyrinth of bureaucratic proliferation, the Pearl-Harbor-as-godsend mindset can become a trap. This, in part, helps explain the failure of the Bush administration’s war on terror, which amounted to a mixture of acute paranoia on the one hand and, on the other hand, confidence that possessing the most sophisticated weapons of mass destruction imaginable would ensure success in deterring or defeating all enemies, real or imagined. Pearl Harbor, in this sense, became a code, symbol, or synecdoche for Big War. This is the outlook that a standard military history written in the 1970s refers to as “the strategy of annihilation,” which became “characteristically the American way in war” long before World War II. It is the mindset that made Rumsfeld’s immediate response to 9-11 (“go massive—sweep it all up—Things related and not”) seem perfectly natural.

Big War, however, was not what combating terrorism or insurgency demanded.199