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Bodyguard of evasions
Establishment historians never pay much attention to
the secret U.S. promises and war plans, and they don't
take them seriously. A prime case in point is what is
frequently represented as the pre-eminent work on Pearl
Harbor: At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl
Harbor by Gordon Prange in collaboration
with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. The work fails to
address the ABD agreement in its main text and makes
only a brief reference to it in an appendix, where an
effort is made to deny the agreement's significance by
means of what could be called a combination of
Talmudic, Jesuitical, and Clintonesque reasoning. The
appendix is the work of Goldstein and Dillon, not
Prange.
1. Goldstein and Dillon point out that the U.S. agreement
with the British and the Dutch was not a treaty and that
the president could not constitutionally commit the
United States to war.
Obviously the president could not declare war, but
America has certainly fought undeclared wars, before
and since 1941. Moreover, more than one president has
steered the country into a position that made a formal
declaration of war likely. The Dutch certainly expected
Franklin Roosevelt to be able to keep his promise,
though the British were less than certain about that and
sought assurances. The Dutch would not have dared to
initiate the war plan if they did not expect the United
States to do likewise. Here the authors seem oblivious to
the significance of the Dutch action, writing that "the
Netherlands East Indies had no authority to commit the
United States to war, regardless of what actions the
Dutch took or recommend for their own protection." (p.
849) Obviously the Dutch could not "force" the United
States to fight, but just as obviously they would enact the
war plan against the powerful Japanese only if they
thought that they would have the support of the United
States. And it seems reasonable to believe, in light of his
overall aims, that Roosevelt intended to keep his
promise, else the agreement would have not have been
made in the first place.
2. The authors claim further that the Rainbow plan was a
strategy for fighting the war once it began but did not
commit the United States to enter the war: "These plans
and discussions did not commit the United States
politically to go to war with Japan, Germany, or both; they
outlined the military strategy to be followed if the
country joined the conflict." (p. 846)
However, the agreement explicitly said that the plan
would go into effect if Japanese moved beyond a
particular geographical point.
3. The authors acknowledge that in early December 1941
Roosevelt promised British Foreign Minister Lord
Halifax that the British could count on American "armed
support" if the Japanese moved southward. The authors
interpret "armed support" to be simply the provision of
arms. (p. 847)
But the United States already supplied arms to Britain
through lend-lease. The promise of "armed support"
definitely implied something more muscular than was
currently taking place. It implied American military
involvement, though perhaps not a full-scale declaration
of war; Roosevelt would need an incident to generate
public support for the latter.
Stephen J. Sniegoski
June 11, 2001
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