Colext/Macondo Cantina virtual de los COLombianos en el EXTerior --------------------------------------------------
"Throughout 1941," wrote Stinnett, "provoking Japan into an overt act of war was the principal policy that guided FDR's actions toward Japan." And Stinnett's documentation is persuasive. Perhaps the most shocking of Roosevelt's actions was the deployment of American cruisers and submarines to the Far East, adjacent to Japan's vital shipping lanes. But in strategic terms, the significant discovery was Stinnett's documentation of how Roosevelt conspired to clear the Northern Pacific of American ships and planes to shield the advance of the Japanese Navy against detection. Had the Japanese been detected, they might have withdrawn their carrier strike force and refused to start a conflict without the advantage of surprise. In 1986 I had the opportunity to ask President Roosevelt's son, James Roosevelt, about the strategy the U.S. government had followed in 1941. James had worked on his father's staff at the time, and openly admitted that Japan was provoked intentionally with the embargo (Japan had almost no other sources of oil). "Why did your father provoke Japan with the blockade," I asked, "when all Japan had to do was attack Britian and the Dutch East Indies, leaving our forces alone?" James Roosevelt smiled faintly and replied, "We were confident how they would react." This answer puzzled me at the time, but after reading Stinnett's book the answer falls neatly into place. The Japanese militarists were fools who did not understand America's isolationist character. President Roosevelt's intelligence officers, on the U.S. side, had intercepted all of Japan's vital communications. If the Japanese did not understand us, we certainly understood them. Japan's codes had been broken. The White House was reading the Imperial mind, anticipating every Japanese move. Japan's intelligence failure was fatal to her miltiary ambition. If Stinnett is right, the United States led Japan into a trap which also caught up Hitler and Mussolini, destroying the Axis completely. All that was left of the dictatorships was Stalin, who had fallen out with Hitler in 1941 and ended up joining the Allies. Was Roosevelt an evil man for the way he conducted U.S. foreign policy in 1941? I doubt that a Jew, whose parents died at Auschwitz, would say so. I doubt that the suffering Chinese would say so. And from Roosevelts action America emerged to be the world's leading power, providing a stable basis for peace and development across the planet. Do the ends justify the means? This is something Americans will have to think about. -------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with UNSUBSCRIBE COLEXT as the BODY of the message. Un archivo de colext puede encontrarse en: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ cortesia de Anibal Monsalve Salazar