Since September, a large billboard has greeted Chicagoans speeding northward on the Kennedy Expressway: ``America Will Never Forget'' declares the statement in the middle, flanked on the left and right by two dates: Dec. 7, 1941, and Sept. 11, 2001. It may not be surprising that the first analogy Americans turned to after the terrorist attacks was Pearl Harbor, since foreign attacks on the United States have occurred so rarely-essentially two big ones in two centuries, in 1812 and 1941. Using a commercial airliner as a deadly missile also qualifies the attack on the Pentagon as an act of war. Sept. 11 is clearly ``a date that will live in infamy,'' and everyone will remember exactly where they were when they first saw or heard this news. But these facts exhaust the analogies with Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor was a case of unprovoked aggression, and has since been condemned not only by Americans, but by the best Japanese historians. As professor Saburo Ienaga wrote decades ago, Japan's militarists ``charged recklessly into an unwinnable war and continued to the point of national destruction.'' But it was no more than military aggression, of a kind the world had experienced many times before; aggression across international borders for reasons of state was as common to history before 1941 as it was rare after 1945. Furthermore, Japan's attack targeted military objectives: Total American casualties in the Pearl Harbor raid were 2,335 naval, army and marine personnel dead, and 1,143 wounded. Total civilians killed: 68. The stunning (if Pyrrhic) success of Japan's strategic operation is frequently mentioned, but few recall the precision with which the attack separated soldier and civilian. A counterforce strike against the American fleet, it had a soldier-to-civilian kill ratio of about 34-to-one.
If an attack on the Pacific fleet was unexpected, it still came decades after the first thoughts of war with Japan emerged in Washington. In 1909, U.S. Navy planners chose Pearl Harbor as the chief American base in the Pacific, and a year later the Taft administration began a systematic consideration of war with Japan; within months it had worked out a detailed Orange Plan for war. Dec. 7, 1941, also came after several years of what Harvard professor Akira Iriye has called a U.S.-Japan Cold War, and after weeks of expecting Japan to strike at American interests. About 10 days before Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War Henry Stimson entered in his diary a famous and much-argued statement-that he had met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss the evidence of impending hostilities with Japan, and the question was ``how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.'' Stimson later told a congressional inquiry that it is dangerous to wait until the enemy ``gets the jump on you by taking the initiative''; nonetheless, ``... in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable ... that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors.''
It is not my purpose to argue that Stimson (or Roosevelt) ``maneuvered'' Japan (or the United States) into the war, but it is noteworthy that most American wars have begun when ``the other guy'' fired the first shot. The strategy of passive defense is not innocent of considerations of power, as any psychologist knows; a nation of superior strength will often find advantage in letting the weaker side strike first. Americans also conveniently forget that the United States was still sitting this global war out, more than two years after Hitler invaded Poland and quickly went on to unify continental Europe under his control-thus to transform the balance of power in the world.
By contrast, the attacks on Sept. 11 were utterly unexpected and unprovoked, had no rational military purpose, took an overwhelming number of innocent civilian lives, and lacked the essential relationship between violent means and political ends that, as Clausewitz taught us, must govern any act of war. In its utter recklessness and indifference to consequences, its craven anonymity, and its lack of any discernible ``program'' save for inchoate revenge, Sept. 11 was an apolitical act. What is the terrorists' next step, what is their strategy, how will the chief terrorists know when they have achieved their goals? What would a ``peace negotiation'' look like with such criminals? The infernal perpetrators are dead-that is not a starting point, but an ending; they accomplished a terrible but ultimately futile and self-defeating act, because they brought into being the very forces that may well put an end to two decades of mindless terrorism. In short, these black events will go down in history as acts of catastrophic nihilism-and precisely that quality makes them much more shocking than anything that happened on Dec. 7, 1941.
For all these reasons, Pearl Harbor is a bad analogy for Sept. 11. But it is not going away: A leading liberal commentator, Bill Moyers, wrote in the Nov. 19 issue of The Nation that he found the comparison apt: ``In response to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans waged and won a great war, then came home to make this country more prosperous and just. It is not beyond this generation to live up to that example.'' Flawed thinking animates the whole statement: there is no ``great war'' unfolding today, the enemy is diabolical but cannot remotely be compared to the might and weight of Nazi Germany or militarist Japan, millions of Americans are not going to be fighting overseas on several fronts, and the current generation is no better or worse than the generation that won victory in World War II (except in the minds of baby-boomer commentators who took rather a long time to comprehend the immense sacrifices that their parents made in the 1940s). Still, Bill Moyer is one of America's best-and most liberal-commentators, which suggests the staying power of this flawed and disturbing analogy. No doubt it will all culminate in a media extravaganza of breast-beating and bad history on this solemn day, the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
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Pearl Harbor a bad analogy for Sept. 11 attacks