 | World War 2, 1939-1945: A U-boat torpedo hit the ocean liner Athenia near Britain with some 1100 passengers, of which 311 were Americans. The sea was calm and only 118 people on board lost their lives. The ship was sunk because it behaved like a military transport, blackened out and zigzagging. This incident wasn't enough to precipitate war, and the Germans also refused to be provoked by several American acts of war. Americans confiscated German merchant ships, and Americans started to support the British with various lend-lease items, US volunteer pilots joined the RAF and some RAF pilots were trained in the US, US gave the British 50 old but usable WW1 destroyers and 20 modern torpedo boats, tanks, light bombers, fighter aircraft like P-40s and so on. American destroyers also escorted the convoys bound to Britain, and attacked German U-boats even far away from those convoys. The US did not maintain a neutral stance attitude towards the warring nations.
The US naval intelligence, chief of Japan desk planned and suggested "8 insults", which should bring Japan into war with the US. President Roosevelt executed this plan immediately and also added some other insults, enraging the Japan. The most serious one was a total blockade of Japanese oil imports, as agreed between the Americans, British and the Dutch. FDR also declared an all-out embargo against the Japan and forbade them the use of Panama canal, impeding Japan's access to Venezuelan oil.
The Flying Tigers volunteer air group successfully fighting the Japanese in China with some 90 fairly modern P-40Bs was another effective provocation that is not generally acknowledged by historical accounts of World War 2, most of which fail to mention any air combat action prior to 7th December 1941. But at that time the Japanese had already had lost about 100 military aircraft, mostly bombers, to the Tigers. After Pearl Harbor these squadrons were some of the the hardest-hitting ones in the US service.
The Americans knew what was going to happen, when and where, but the president did not dispatch this information to Pearl Harbor. Americans even gave their friends the British 3 Magic decrypting machines which automatically opened encrypted Japanese military traffic. But this same information was not available to the commanders of Hawaii. The movement of the fleet was also visible in the very effective radio direction finding network. Japan had an alliance with Germany, and the Germans upheld their promises by declaring the war against the USA right after the Japanese declaration.
Two scapegoats, the navy commander Admiral Husband Kimmel, and the army commander Lt. General Walter Short were found incompetent and demoted as they were allowed to retire. Short died 1949 and Kimmel 1958. In 1995, the US Congress re-examined this decision and endorsed it. Then in 2000 some archive information came to light and the US Senate passed a resolution stating that both hadserved in Hawaii "competently and professionally". In 1941 they were denied vital information, and even on presidential orders purposefully mislead into believing that the Japanese feet could be expected from the southwest. These commanders have yet to be rehabilited by the Pentagon.
Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan invasion), 7.10.2001-: Without any evidence, the former CIA-asset, a Saudi-Arabian Osama bin Laden was claimed to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 strikes at the WTC and the Pentagon. Such a complex operation, if actually executed which it was not, in this case would be much beyond the capabilities of anything in Afghanistan. Only some top ten intelligence services in the world could hope to be successful in such an operation involving forgery, infiltration, living "underground" in a foreign non-Muslim country, coordination of moves, illegal arms, hi-quality flight training, accurate aircraft navigation in no-visibility conditions and so on. Perhaps even less, because the friends of the US (at that time, still most of the world) would also have been interested in stopping the attack.
Enduring Justice (Second Gulf war), 20.3.2003-: later known with less irony as Operation Iraqi Freedom The claimed reason of the attack was that Iraq was a clear and present danger to the US with wmd's available within less than an hour after the decision to assemble them has been made. Since no wmd's were found, and after the Iraqi also scrapped some 800 long range Scud style missiles before the US coalition attack, the reason for the invasion was changed into "bringing the democracy into Iraq". |