Pearl Harbour, Dick Cheney and Saddam Hussein - 7 December 1990

I was about to say that 7 December, is a fixed, not to say a sombre, date in the American memory. But then you have to say, what do you mean by the American memory?

I am afraid it’s a literary phrase which implies what is patently untrue – namely that certain dates, or events in history, get permanently filed away in the memory bank of every American.

The only memories that keep such things on file are the memories, or perhaps the computers, of historians. We have had too much experience of the past year or two of the huge ignorance of history and geography on the part of young college-age Americans to expect much at all from the American memory of the young.

Recently it was reported that more than a third of college students in the south-west – in, that is, the states that border on Mexico – could not identify the name of the country that borders the United States to the south.

And in a survey two years ago, something like 40% of Californian college students, confused the identities and achievements of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. I don’t think we can expect even the baby boomers who are now sobered into grey hairs and advanced parenthood to know too much about a war, that ended just before they were born.

Well it was an American president Franklin Roosevelt – who’s he? – who called 7 December, a date that will live in infamy. It was the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and quite a lot of listeners, certainly teenagers, may well ask, where and what is Pearl Harbor?

Well, this Friday, is the 49th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and why should a young American who thinks of Elvis Presley as a contemporary of Beethoven, know anything at all about the day America went to war, way back there in the early '40s?

If anyone of any age is still feeling uncomfortable about placing Pearl Harbor, let me tell you what happened to me and a close friend, an Englishman, I was staying with in Washington over the weekend of Saturday to Monday, December 6th to the 8th, 1941.

On a brilliant cold Sunday afternoon the two of us, our wives had gone for a healthy walk, the two of us sat down before a fire and tuned in the radio to a concert of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which for, anyone halfway musical was always the big event on a Sunday afternoon in winter.

We chatted idly while the orchestra was tuning up, they were about to play, as I do well recall, the Shostakovich 7th Symphony. The tuning-up stopped abruptly and in the following silence we expected to hear the tap of the baton, and the opening chords.

Instead, a nervous man’s voice stumbled in and declared, without any of the usual station announcer's frills, "The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor". There was not much more than that – damage unknown. My friend was a member of the British Supply Council, whose business was to lobby Congress and the White House to get aid, from weapons to food packages, to Britain during this very strained period of American neutrality.

We looked at each other. The simple fact was that neither of us had ever heard of Pearl Harbor. We got out an atlas, we looked up the index, we turned to a map of the North Pacific and there, at Honolulu in the Hawaiian islands, was a tiny marker, Pearl Harbor, a footnote said, main base of the United States Pacific fleet.

"Wow," we said, quoting Groucho Marx, as we thought facetiously, "this means war". And so it did, we didn’t know till the war was over that on that Sunday morning the Japanese bombers, winging in over the main Hawaiian island really crippled the United States fleet, sinking or badly damaging 19 capital ships, and leaving over 2,000 dead.

Next day, President Roosevelt appeared before Congress and, in accordance with the usual constitutional procedure, asked Congress to declare that a state of war does now exist between the United States and the empire of Japan. Congress voted by acclamationg, with one dissenter, a lady.

Three days after that, and after Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States, Congress reciprocated and declared war on them, the last time Congress has exercised its constitutional privilege. As I mentioned last week, and as the senators and congressmen hate to hear, we're now warning the secretary of defence that neither he nor the president can commit troops to war in the Gulf without their say so.

Why, to wind up this brief ancient history lesson, why did President Roosevelt characterise 7 December as a date that would live in infamy?

What was infamous about the Japanese attack was that it was unannounced, it followed no ultimatum – indeed, the Japanese had their hand battered to the United States, and a special envoy from the foreign office just arrived in America to hold talks with the secretary of state, Mr Hull, with the purpose, they said, of straightening out some misunderstandings about Japan’s intentions in south-east Asia.

Well this mission was a great success. If the Japanese had any aggressive military intentions against the United States they certainly wouldn’t act on them while they had two their top diplomats actually conferring in the White House would they? Well yes, they would and did.

The Japanese bombing squadron had flown halfway across the Pacific without being spotted, and when they came darting in towards the Hawaiian islands, that Pearl Harbor garrison was sleeping off a happy Saturday night.

An old wily Welshman I knew, who’d spent a lot of time in the Orient, told me next day, not the least of the things the Japanese have learnt about us is that our Achilles heel is the weekend. Even the radar operator was a standby. He thought he saw what looked like a fleet of planes approaching. He said so, he was told to look again, the proud ships of the Pacific fleet were snugly slotted in their berths, the air force and navy planes were lined up neatly wing-tip to wing-tip, as if for a ceremonial review.

What I am saying is that the terrible success of Japan's first strike in the Second World War was due in the first place to what outraged Americans called its sneakiness and what the best military strategists, from Julius Caesar to Douglas MacArthur, have called the priceless element of surprise.

Struck me the other day that in the increasingly public argument between the president and the Congress, about who has the power to take the country into war, what the Congress wants to deny the president, and what he seems determined not to give up, is this very element of surprise.

Which, since wars began, has been contrived, and sought after more than another tactic. I ought to say that, so far as I know, neither side has even hinted that that is what the controversy is about. When I say it was becoming increasingly public I am referring to the congressional hearings that have started.

Last week the senate armed services committee held hearings into the Gulf crisis, wanting to know what the president's intentions are. And then the Senate foreign relations committee started to put on its show.

I suppose the main witness, the main target, of senators who fear that the president is running hot-foot for war, was Mr Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, because Mr Cheney believes – and said it very plainly – that sanctions against Iraq, even if they are enforced for a year or more, won't work. And in the meantime, Sadam Hussein can perfect his chemical warheads and develop his nuclear bomb.

Mr Cheney talked about dealing with Suddam Hussein now. "Dealing with", of course, has one meaning, and suddenly even old hawks and favourites of the Pentagon started to shudder, and to warn the president not to let slip too soon the dogs of war.

The way most of the objectors put their objection is to go on reminding the president, through his testifying advisers, that the Constitution says only the Congress can declare war. Now, we come to my point about surprise.

Clearly, if the president decided to call a special session of Congress – the old Congress is dead and the new one won’t assemble till January – it obviously will take a day or two to call a session, then the president appears makes a speech, asks for a declaration of war against Iraq, the Congress votes, and then presumably the signal is given by the president through his chiefs of staff, to General Schwarzkopf, the desert commander. And then the attack begins, what is Saddam Hussein doing all this time? Tapping his teeth and patiently waiting?

Of course he would certainly, many days before, have seized the initiative. So, finally and bluntly the administration through Mr Cheney has answered the constant reminder about the Constitution's provision that only Congress can declare war. Sure, but only the president, as commander-in-chief, can wage it.

Last Monday, Mr Cheney kept on saying the president can commit forces, start a war in fact, without anybody’s approval. Two hundred times, he recalled, presidents have started wars, only five times have Congress got in on the act.

Mr Cheney, it appeared, and General Powell, the chairman of the chief of staff and President Bush do not mean to deny themselves the secret advantage the Japanese exploited so terribly well on the morning of 7 December 1941.

By the way, the word just in from Tokyo is that an influential group of Japanese is urging the prime minister to anticipate the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor next December by issuing now a formal apology to the United States for Pearl Harbor. It seems that Japanese leaders have already apologised to China, for the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s.

This suggests a whole flock of apologies coming from Germany, to Libya, Granada, Panama. My wife says that since they finally broken through the Channel Tunnel, wouldn’t it be a good thing if Prime Minister Major and the present Duke of Wellington formally apologised to the French people for the battle of Waterloo.

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