David Horowitz & Ben Johnson: The Wrong Argument, at the Wrong Place, at the Wrong Time
FALSE CHARGES THAT PRESIDENTS LIED US INTO WAR are nothing new, nor are the recriminations leveled against President Bush’s Iraq war the most outrageous on record. The toxic allegation that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and deliberately allowed the Japanese to destroy the Pacific fleet to get reluctant Americans to join the war was the subject of a congressional investigation at the time, the subject of a book by America's leading historian Charles Beard (President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War) and wild accusations by Clare Boothe Luce and others. Recent scholars like John Toland and Robert Stinnett have repeated the charges. Today, these are generally regard as fringe accusations just as the left's present mania will seem as such when future generations look back on the conspiracy-theorist opponents of the war for freedom in Iraq.
Naturally, the evidence weighs against the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, but even if it were true would it change one iota the way Americans feel having gone to war against the fascist Axis? Americans would not demand we apologize to Emperor Hirohito, nor question the way we imposed constitutional democracy on the Axis powers after a prolonged (and bloody) military conflict and years of occupation.
Democracies are reluctant to go to war in the first place. In April 1941, when Hitler had already conquered all of continental Europe, a Gallup poll showed that 70% of the American public wanted to stay out of the war. It took a Pearl Harbor to change their minds. Whether this was a Roosevelt plot to deceive and manipulate that change does not affect one iota the moral issue of whether we should have opposed the Axis powers or not. The rationale for the war, the excuse for getting America into the war, is irrelevant in the face of what we know World War II was about.
So why is the nation focusing now on a bogus argument about the rationale for the war in Iraq? There is not a shred of evidence Bush in any way manipulated or falsified intelligence, yet leftists demand investigations in order to breathe new life into conspiracy theories whose only effect can be to encourage our enemies and sap our nation's will to fight. Even if Sen. Pat Roberts’ Senate Intelligence Committee should uncover information that the president had manipulated intelligence in order to convince the American people to topple Saddam Hussein, that would not affect the question of whether the war we are in is one we should be fighting.
Yet there is no basis for expecting that any such evidence would be found....
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Naturally, the evidence weighs against the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, but even if it were true would it change one iota the way Americans feel having gone to war against the fascist Axis? Americans would not demand we apologize to Emperor Hirohito, nor question the way we imposed constitutional democracy on the Axis powers after a prolonged (and bloody) military conflict and years of occupation.
Democracies are reluctant to go to war in the first place. In April 1941, when Hitler had already conquered all of continental Europe, a Gallup poll showed that 70% of the American public wanted to stay out of the war. It took a Pearl Harbor to change their minds. Whether this was a Roosevelt plot to deceive and manipulate that change does not affect one iota the moral issue of whether we should have opposed the Axis powers or not. The rationale for the war, the excuse for getting America into the war, is irrelevant in the face of what we know World War II was about.
So why is the nation focusing now on a bogus argument about the rationale for the war in Iraq? There is not a shred of evidence Bush in any way manipulated or falsified intelligence, yet leftists demand investigations in order to breathe new life into conspiracy theories whose only effect can be to encourage our enemies and sap our nation's will to fight. Even if Sen. Pat Roberts’ Senate Intelligence Committee should uncover information that the president had manipulated intelligence in order to convince the American people to topple Saddam Hussein, that would not affect the question of whether the war we are in is one we should be fighting.
Yet there is no basis for expecting that any such evidence would be found....