Too often, I think, my fellow Americans view World War II as having begun that frightful Sunday morning December seventh, 1941 when carrier-based Japanese warplanes, in an unprovoked and dastardly attack on the United States fleet in Pearl Harbor, killed two thousand four hundred people, destroyed or damaged fifteen warships, and demolished almost two hundred aircraft.\u00a0 In my mind the war for us had really begun in Europe more than two years earlier \u2013 and seventy years ago today \u2013 as the first German bombardment of Poland assured we would someday help liberate the continent from whence so many of our ancestors came.\u00a0 I must as well emphasize the Japanese had attacked Manchuria in 1931 and for much of the 1930s pulverized the Chinese.\u00a0 We in the West don\u2019t call that World War II.\u00a0 Perhaps we should.<\/p>\n
I knew Japanese expansion in the Pacific would someday precipitate a conflict with us, so I began to wage economic warfare by denying them essential raw materials, and at the same time provoked the Germans by Lend Leasing the British ships and weapons, hounding and depth charging U-boats, threatening to shoot on sight any German ship we considered hostile or inconvenient, and by calling Hitler a rattlesnake.\u00a0 My vision and actions were vindicated long before my death in April 1945, and only briefly will I backhand the charge I knew an attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent and let it happen to ensure American outrage and commitment to total war.\u00a0 I\u2019m confident few believe such drivel, and to the deceivers declare: I welcome your enmity.<\/p>\n
Occasionally I\u2019m irritated my most dangerous opponent survived me and briefly celebrated my demise before he bit cyanide eighteen days later.\u00a0 When gasoline drenched his corpse and a match ignited it, Europe was forever free of Nazi barbarism.\u00a0 My legacy by contrast is still embodied in progressive movements around the world.\u00a0 This might not have been so if paralysis hadn\u2019t deadened my legs in 1921 and compelled me to reassess my life and better empathize with those who lacked good fortune.<\/p>\n
Though it would be disingenuous to deny I was a patrician, I promise you I have remained a fundamentally democratic man.\u00a0 As such I must be frank and admit I too would likely have made most of the critical foreign policy commitments of my successors.\u00a0 A few years after World War II I certainly would\u2019ve combated the communist hordes, Chinese as well as Korean, who violated international law by attacking South Korea.\u00a0 I do wonder, however, what would\u2019ve happened if we hadn\u2019t intervened: all of Korea would\u2019ve been red for a generation, but communism\u2019s imperative to self-destruct probably would have liberated the nation instead of leaving it still divided and confrontational.<\/p>\n
Would I, by the early 1960s, have become enlightened enough to understand that monolithic communism was a myth and did not have to be physically confronted in Viet Nam?\u00a0 Like so many other Americans, I imagine I would somehow have terrified myself into equating the aggression of Ho Chi Minh in an isolated civil war to the international voraciousness of Adolf Hitler.\u00a0 Fundamentally ridiculous, we now understand, but then seemingly a sound principle of self defense and universal law and order.<\/p>\n
I concur with the elder President Bush that in 1990, following Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraqi invasion and ravaging of oil-glutted Kuwait, the quintessential question was: what if we do nothing?\u00a0 In related circumstances American presidents must always do something: even if wrong ethically and militarily, they\u2019ll be temporarily right in domestic politics.\u00a0 Killing foreigners always galvanizes a citizenry.<\/p>\n
After September 11, 2001 I, like young President Bush, would have charged into Afghanistan and tried to demolish the Taliban and Al Qaeda.\u00a0 At that point, and without hindsight, I diverge from George W. Bush and declare the United States should\u2019ve maintained a Taliban and Al Qaeda first strategy since they\u2019d indisputably murdered three thousand Americans while Iraq had been defeated in 1991 and thereafter surrounded and economically straight-jacketed.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible young Bush would counter by saying: okay, Roosevelt, you said you had a Hitler first policy but in fact you also simultaneously waged a huge war in the Pacific.\u00a0 To the sincere president, I would thusly respond: we were fighting a world war, two world wars, really, and drafted ten percent of the population, some fourteen million soldiers, including your father and the two oldest Kennedy boys, to combat major powers which had projected and sustained violence far beyond their national borders.\u00a0 I must conclude a defeated Saddam Hussein is not analogous to the rampaging armies of Germany and Japan early in World War II.<\/p>\n
Now you want to know what I would do about Afghanistan, years after America diverted its attention and allowed the Taliban to rebuild.\u00a0 I believe I\u2019d accept we couldn\u2019t, on a limited war basis, pacify that region and impose our policies.\u00a0 Therefore, we must compel, cajole, and pay the Taliban to do what concerns us most: banish Al Qaeda from Afghanistan.\u00a0 If terrorists plotting to attack America and our interests are not given refuge in that harsh, mountainous land, then we have achieved what we must.\u00a0 President Obama agrees with me, doesn\u2019t he?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Too often, I think, my fellow Americans view World War II as having begun that frightful Sunday morning December seventh, 1941 when carrier-based Japanese warplanes, in an unprovoked and dastardly attack on the United States fleet in Pearl Harbor, killed two thousand four hundred people, destroyed or damaged fifteen warships, and demolished almost two hundred…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,218,297,40,84,83],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n