A Day Which Will Live In Infamy

by digby

I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about Pearl Harbor day today. But considering the crossroads at which we find ourselves at the end of the Bush era, this piece about the Japanese attacks and doctrine of preventive war (aka the Bush Doctrine)gives an important historical overview of why (until the neocon fanatics took over) the US did not assert that doctrine.

That is not to say we didn’t invade other countries on trumped up rationales or thin evidence. We certainly did. But it was a given among western democracies after the two horrifying wars of the 20th century that wars of aggression were a no-no. But just as Bush and Cheney decided that 9/11 changed everything such that even the civilized taboos against torture were out of fashion, they openly flouted and then discarded the world’s consensus on this issues after WWII. We became what we had once abhorred.