It's December 7. It's time to remember Pearl Harbor. Though the Post had an article today, I haven't seen anything much on the TV news. December 7 just doesn't stick in our heads the way it did for our parents' generation. I'm not trying to bash Japan, but my generation was the heir to the generation that never forgot Pearl Harbor. For them, it was rather like the Kennedy assassination for me, or 9/11 for all of us. This isn't my video: it's one from YouTube. The Roosevelt speech is here in full, but some of the graphics may be a bit propagandistic.
Nevertheless, I've always felt that Pearl Harbor was a profound lesson in intelligence failure. I've read a lot on the subject; have a pretty full library in fact. I'm not a conspiracy theorist on it: I've always thought Roberta Wohlstetter explained it best with her "signal" versus "noise" explanation of how intelligence failures happen: as they did again at 9/11. After the fact, Monday-morning quarterbacking, it's a lot easier to see what was coming, or "connect the dots" as we say these days. I wrote a little about this in The Estimate after 9/11, referencing Pearl Harbor, in this article. And, of course, Pearl Harbor began for the US its role in the greatest war in history, one that China had already been in for years and Europe for a couple of years as well. I always tell Sarah that China had the longest war of World War II. Her home town of Changde suffered terribly, including from biological warfare, but never fell to the Japanese.
And, much as I hate to refer to the television of the newspaper world, USA Today, this article reminds us of the dwindling number of those who remember Pearl Harbor in the most direct way.
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