President Franklin D. Roosevelt was eager to enter the war in Europe.
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5230
For the past 67 years America has commemorated over 2,400 sailors, soldiers and airmen who were killed in the Japanese attack on http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4876 on December 7, 1941. Every such anniversary reminds us that all history is to some extent contemporary history: Almost seven decades after the event, the myth of FDR’s goodness and greatness—revived for current political purposes during and after this year’s election campaign—makes it less “appropriate” than ever to ask if he knew about the attack; and, more importantly, whether he willed it. This date “will live in infamy,” for a few more decades at least, until it succumbs to this country’s collective amnesia. We may be running out of time for its infamy to be allocated more equitably.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was eager to enter the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4600. He wanted this strongly following the fall of France (June 1940)—when he came to believe that without American intervention the Nazis would conquer the Old Continent—and desperately after Germany attacked the Soviet Union a year later. In this desire he was supported by the old East Coast elite which was traditionally Anglophile, by the increasingly influential Jewish lobby, and—after June 22, 1941—by Moscow’s sympathizers within his entourage and in the country at large.After meeting the President at the Atlantic Conference (August 14, 1941) Churchill noted the “astonishing depth of Roosevelt’s intense desire for war.” But there was a problem: FDR could not overcome the isolationist resistance to “Europe’s war” felt by most Americans and their elected representatives. The mood of the country was anti-war and, according to the revisionists’ key claim, Roosevelt therefore provoked the Japanese into attacking the United States – while his real target was Hitler. It is further claimed that, even though Roosevelt was aware of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, he let it happen, and was relieved when it did happen.
The evidence on FDR maneuvering Japan into war, available for decades, was semi-definitively presented in Robert Stinnett’s “Day of Deceit” (1999). The evidence of his foreknowledge of the attack itself appears equally convincing in three respects: denial of intelligence to the Navy; misleading its commanders, in the final two weeks before the attack, into thinking negotiations with Japan were continuing; and keeping them misinformed about the location of the Japanese carrier fleet.
Chronologically the important elements of the scenario proceeded as follows:
On September 27, 1940, the Tripartite Pact – the mutual assistance treaty between Germany, Italy, and Japan—was signed in Berlin. It implied the possibility that Germany would declare war on America if America were to get into war with Japan, which greatly impacted FDR’s policy towards Japan from that moment on.
On October 7, 1940, only a week after the signing of the Tripartite Pact, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), suggested a strategy for provoking Japan into attacking the U.S., triggering the mutual assistance provisions of the Tripartite Pact, and bringing America into World War II. Summarized in McCollum’s memo the ONI proposal called for height specific steps aimed at provoking Japan. Its centerpiece was keeping the might of the U.S. Fleet based in Hawaii as a lure for a Japanese attack, and imposing an American oil embargo against Japan. “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better,” the memo concluded.
Also in October 1940, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral J.O. Richardson, protested President Roosevelt’s decision to move the fleet from the protected waters of the West Coast to the vulnerable base at Hawaii. Richardson was relieved of his command four months after his meeting with FDR and was replaced by Rear Admiral Kimmel.
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=815