WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- Friday, Dec. 7, marks the 60th anniversary of Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Nearly 2,000 American sailors and soldiers were killed that grim morning.
Much of America's Pacific battle fleet was sent to the bottom by Japanese bombs and torpedoes. Aptly described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "day that will live in infamy," lessons from that distant horizon are relevant to the most recent "day of infamy" -- Sept. 11 and the horrific attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon near Washington.
Both days of infamy were long in the making. Both days of infamy were the results of perverted and distorted ambitions and supreme miscalculations by the perpetrators. For the time being, it remains to be seen whether the causes and systemic reasons for the Sept. 11 attacks can be redressed with the same effect that so profoundly transformed a belligerent and aggressive Japan after the war was won.
The seeds for Pearl Harbor date back to 1853. A squadron of U.S. Navy "black ships," named for the color of their hulls, sailed into Japanese waters. Under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry, the U.S. Navy began the long process of "opening" Japan to Western influence with this first extended visit.
Japan had been protected and isolated by geography and culture. But the overwhelming and obvious superiority of Western arms and technology made Japan recognize its vulnerability to foreign intervention, attack and even conquest. The response was an intense Japanese effort to modernize and westernize a feudal economy and military. The results were remarkable.
Five decades later, Japan had modernized its industry and economy and produced a first-class army and navy. It fought and defeated China in the 1894-95 war. It vanquished Russian forces in the Pacific in two years, starting that war with a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1903. In the process, Japan occupied Korea and, as World War I wound down in 1918, joined the allied side and was rewarded with a slice of Chinese territory seized from the defeated Germans and divided among the victors.
Japan continued her aggressive industrial and military modernization. Her political system remained autocratic, growing increasingly fascistic. As the military and expansionist cliques seized political power, their policy for dealing with Japan's sparse resources and growing industrial appetite was to move outward to gain and control access to the vital iron ore, coal and petroleum needed for sustaining a modern economy.
Japan's ambition had few limits.
By 1940, with Adolf Hitler occupying Europe and eyeing Russia as the next target, Japan's principal obstacle and threat to expansion was the United States. To remove this constraint, the Japanese military thought process sought to reduce that task to the lowest common denominator. Invading the United States was out of the question. However, a less ambitious strategic plan was not.
There were two basic reasons that led to the strategy to attack Pearl Harbor. Destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet would give the Japanese at least six months and probably more to expand into East Asia and consolidate its territorial gains without serious opposition.
Second, the Japanese believed the shock of that attack would cripple America's will to resist and a negotiated peace or armistice would follow.
Japan could not have been more profoundly wrong. In the aftermath of three and a half years of war, the United States won "unconditionally."
The occupation of Japan was one of the more incredible moments of history, turning Japan from a fascist and belligerent state into a peaceful and strong democracy.
The root causes motivating Sept. 11 do not date as far back. The end of World War II, the crucial U.S. role and presence in the Middle East and the establishment of Israel in 1948 were precursor events. The end of the Cold War and the Gulf War in 1991, and the growing globalization of the world economies, in combination with the autocratic nature of many of the regimes in the Middle East, had sad side effects. Osama bin Laden is one of them.
In many ways, as Japan's leaders pursued what became a perverted policy of extreme industrialization and modernization a century ago, bin Laden has embraced a distorted view of Islam to fire his revolution.
And, as the Japanese miscalculated 60 years ago, bin Laden mistakenly believed the United States would submit to the horrors of Sept. 11 with far greater passivity.
The real test for the United States, as was the case in 1941, is not whether it will win this particular war. It will. The test will be how it copes with the peace. This is the best lesson to learn from that first "day of infamy."
(Harlan Ullman is a UPI columnist.)
