True enough, but the Germans were doing almost as well against themselves, having attacked a great many US ships since 1939 and sunk a few, including at least one in US territorial waters. (Usual googles quickly come up with sites like http://www.usmm.org/casualty.html and there is stuff on the amazing http://uboat.net/)
Also US forces (in the guise of military advisors to the Chinese, "Flying Tigers" and so on) had been involved on a small scale in the war against Japan for some years. Pearl Harbo(u)r didn't get the US into the war - that was happening anyway - it just made it trivial for the government to crush the opposition to joining in. My googling around also came up with this justification of US involvement by Roosevelt: http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/7-2-188/188-26.html (which is probably old hat to you but not being a USAian I haven't seen such stuff of course) Some similarities (presumably not coincidental) to things said recently, though George Bush could do with some of those old speechwriters. Ken Sunder wrote: > > Um, how do you think the USA got sucked into WWII anyway? Sure Pearl > Harbor did the trick, but before that, the Brits were running psyops on us > trying to change our isolationist policies. > On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Eugene Leitl wrote: > > > On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Lucky Green wrote: > > > > > So where is the news? Is it that the government is admitting to this > > > well-known fact? > > > > Admitting to run PSYOPS against allies has novelty at least to me. > > Widespread realization of this results in loss of efficiency in > > communication (everything is assumed to be a lie a priori unless proven > > otherwise) and voter-driven change in policy (e.g. EU-US axis). > >
