There are some who will argue that the Japanese took the bait and attacked Pearl Harbor to drag the USA into the war with the Nazis (and save the British). Let’s go down the rabbit hole.
The USA effectively shut off the Japanese oil supply by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States on July 26, 1941. Because Japan relied on the U.S. for roughly 80% of its petroleum, this economic maneuver completely paralyzed its ability to purchase American oil. The escalation occurred in a series of steps driven by Japan’s aggressive military expansion in Asia. Let’s talk about that.
1. The Export Control Act (July 1940) – As Japan extended its war into China, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the newly passed Export Control Act to restrict the flow of military supplies. In July 1940, the U.S. cut off shipments of scrap iron, steel, and high-grade aviation fuel, but purposely allowed regular crude oil to keep flowing to avoid provoking an immediate war.
2. The Occupation of Indochina – Instead of backing down, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy and invaded northern French Indochina to block supply routes into China. When Japanese troops moved into southern Indochina in July 1941—positioning themselves to strike British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies—the Roosevelt administration decided to take decisive action.
3. The Asset Freeze (July 26, 1941) – Rather than passing an explicit, legally complicated oil embargo, Roosevelt signed an executive order freezing all Japanese financial assets in the United States. This meant Japan no longer had access to the dollars required to buy American oil. Shortly after, the British Empire and the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) followed suit with their own financial restrictions. Within days, Japan lost 94% of its total oil imports. The Imperial Japanese Navy estimated it had only 18 to 24 months of fuel reserves remaining. Faced with the choice of either fully withdrawing from China to get the sanctions lifted or seizing the oil-rich regions of Southeast Asia by force, Japanese leadership chose war. To protect their flank while invading the Dutch East Indies, they launched the preemptive strike on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was a backwater at the time, but six Movietone camera crews were sent to Oahu weeks before the attack, during the upcoming holidays, with nothing to film until that Sunday. Coincidence? You be the judge.
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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that dragged the US into the Vietnam War in full force was based on a lie. That band-aid was ripped off some time ago. I have no love for the Communists (then or now), but the larger war was based on a deliberate fabrication. Declassified National Security Agency documents released in 2005 confirmed that the August 4 attack never actually happened and was a product of miscommunication rather than a staged conspiracy. While it wasn’t a fabricated false flag, the administration knowingly weaponized bad intelligence to justify a pre-desired military escalation.
See The Pentagon Papers. After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, President Richard Nixon’s administration created a secret White House Special Investigations Unit known as the “Plumbers” to plug security leaks. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were hired as the unit’s lead operatives. They later organized the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Before the Watergate burglary, Liddy, Hunt, and other Plumbers broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, trying to find files to discredit Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers.
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The First Iraq War – Invasion of Kuwait – Ambassador April Glaspie (right) tacitly green-lighted Saddam Hussein’s invasion by assuring him that the US would not respond. On July 25, 1990, just eight days before Iraq’s invasion, Ambassador Glaspie was suddenly summoned to meet with Saddam Hussein. At the time, Iraqi troops were massing on the Kuwaiti border. T
The Iraqi Transcript: Following the invasion, Iraq released a transcript of the meeting. In it, Glaspie is quoted as telling Saddam, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” and noting that Secretary of State James Baker had emphasized that Kuwait was not directly associated with America. Critics argue this statement assured Saddam that the United States would not intervene militarily.
The U.S. State Department Cables: Declassified U.S. diplomatic cables and WikiLeaks releases largely confirmed that Glaspie used this standard diplomatic phrasing, reflecting official State Department instructions that the U.S. did not take a legal stance on specific inter-Arab border demarcations.
Glaspie (who had no business being in that position at that time and place) may have only been a weak DEI tool. Halliburton made a lot of money. We killed a lot of people.
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The War in Afghanistan occurred because we had to attack ‘somebody’ after the 911 attacks, perpetrated by Saudi nationals and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani militant. Was it a genuine war on terror, or did it begin small and morph into a massive grift against the American taxpayer wherein contractors and NGOs gorged themselves on the “Full Faith and Credit of the United States”? The U.S. government justified the extended, 20-year war in Afghanistan by continuously shifting and expanding its strategic objectives from immediate counter-terrorism self-defense to nation-building, regional stability, and human rights.
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The Second Iraq War – Weapons of Mass Destruction – was likewise based on a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I was in a position to ‘know’ that they were only ‘hoping’ we would find the weapons to justify the war. We killed a lot of people. Bipartisan investigations and post-war reports (such as the Iraq Survey Group report) concluded that senior officials selectively used raw, unverified intelligence and relied heavily on unreliable informants and Iraqi exiles. President Bush later acknowledged that the pre-war intelligence turned out to be false and stated he was disappointed and responsible for the flawed outcome, though he maintained that removing Saddam Hussein was still the correct security decision.
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Iran War – Regarding ongoing military actions involving the U.S. and Israel against Iran, the jury is out. There is no question that Iran was developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems, which it openly vowed to use against Israel and US interests (in the Middle East and to directly attack the USA. Critics argue that Netanyahu’s long-standing push for confrontation with Tehran successfully nudged Washington into a wider war. Proponents and administration officials maintain that military action is driven by core American interests—such as protecting U.S. forces, regional allies, and addressing threats from Iranian ballistic missiles and nuclear infrastructure—rather than external pressure.
The Ayatollah is dead. Ayatollah Jr. is said to exist, but nobody has seen evidence of that. He is said to have lost a leg as a result of bombing and to have been injured. No matter what, the credibility of the “new king” is in doubt. The top 1000 people in Iran, including their nuclear scientists, are dead. Their clients in Gaza are dead. Hezbollah in Lebanon is seriously degraded.
I believe that the US needs to destroy much of what is modern Iran and encourage the Persians to remove the IRGC and establish a popular government that can be a good neighbor and can represent the welfare of the Persian people. I don’t think we’re finished with them – and we need to finish what we started.
Let’s devote a paragraph to the Houthis before we move on, though much can be written about Yemen.
The Houthis have an axe to grind with the Saudis, who are US allies of convenience. The Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah or Ansarullah, are a Zaydi revivalist and Shia Islamist political and military organization that emerged from Yemen in the 1990s. It is made up mostly of Zaydis, whose leadership is drawn largely from the al-Houthi family. Where the Iranian Shia are “Twelvers,” the Houthis are “Fivers.” Unlike Twelver Shiites—who believe in twelve specific, divinely appointed Imams with the twelfth in occultation—Zaydis parted ways over the identity of the Fifth Imam and do not share the doctrine of the Twelve Imams. Zaydism is doctrinally closer to Sunni Islam in certain ritual and legal aspects than Twelver Shiism is, though it maintains core Shia principles regarding the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants. While the Houthis receive military and political backing from Iran (predominantly Twelver), their alliance is primarily a geopolitical partnership within the Axis of Resistance rather than a shared theological identity. The conflict between the Saudis and the Houthis is complicated – as is everything in the Middle East.
Bullet Points:
** Cause of death.
** Ryan on the toxicity of SpecWar.
** How long have you been married?
In the Russian Arctic (and Ukraine)
A good piece on the Russian Arctic Initiative. Worth the view. Well produced and researched.
Russia’s specialized Arctic ground forces have been functionally decimated and hollowed out after being redeployed from their bases on the Kola Peninsula to fight in Ukraine. Two primary Arctic warfare units have borne the brunt of these catastrophic losses:
1. 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade (Arctic)
Background & Deployment: Stationed in Pechenga near the border with Norway and Finland, the 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade was considered one of Russia’s most elite, technologically advanced, and feared Arctic forces. It was among the first units deployed to Ukraine during the initial invasion, where it carried out a failed assault on Kharkiv.
Destruction: According to Western intelligence and internal documents reviewed by journalists, the unit was effectively wiped out during the first few months of combat. By late May 2022, fewer than 900 soldiers remained of its initial 1,400 to 1,600-man Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs). The brigade lost dozens of its sophisticated, Arctic-optimized T-80BVM tanks and specialized mobile rocket launchers. Military analysts noted that rebuilding this specialized unit to its former strength will take years, and it was later reorganized into a broader motor rifle division to compensate for its structural hollowing.
2. 80th Arctic Motor Rifle Brigade
Background & Deployment: Stationed in Alakurtti, Murmansk Oblast, the 80th Arctic Motor Rifle Brigade was custom-built in 2014 under the Northern Fleet Strategic Command to wage specialized warfare in extreme sub-zero conditions. Because of massive manpower shortages, they were misallocated to Ukraine and deployed far outside their element to the sweltering, wet marshes of the Dnieper-Bug estuary and islands in the Kherson region.
Destruction: The brigade was functionally destroyed by Ukrainian precision strikes and counter-operations. Independent military reports and analysts confirmed the brigade suffered up to 80% casualties. Along with severe personnel losses, the unit lost rare, highly advanced Arctic military hardware designed strictly for polar operations, including: Tor-M2DT surface-to-air missile defense systems, DT-30 Vityaz heavy tracked Arctic transport vehicles, and GAZ-3344-20 ‘Aleut’ Arctic all-terrain vehicles.
Strategic Impact
The destruction of these specialized troops has fundamentally altered the security landscape of the High North. Regional intelligence groups report that Russia’s Arctic ground posture has been reduced to a fifth of its pre-war size, shifting the operational advantage in the Arctic Circle entirely toward NATO and its northern allies.
Parting Shot
End
Beware the military-industrial complex! Dwight David Eisenhower
They survive because the US government prints money. And they can always print more.
sending this to a good friend, used to be a chopper pilot. ‘Nam. ‘though a true U.S conservative I think he was left with doubts ’bout why he (and others) were sent.
I think he”ll enjoy (if that’s the word?) reading the entire piece. mebbe become a VM commenter.
The more the merrier.
‘Nam
I heard it being said, at the time ~67 that we were over there to assure continuing French (ours perhaps also?) control of the oil fields off the Eastern coast, somewhere SE in the waters off Saigon.
I didn’t (and still don’t) know how much truth there is to that.
The first commercial quantities of oil were discovered by Pecten (a Shell subsidiary) at the Bach Ho (White Tiger) field in 1974
No wish to argue the point, but “it was said” back in ~ June 67 by a dentist (what then?) I met who’d been at Phan Rang.
He made it quite plain he’d no wish to support the French companies in their effort to control the oil fields they’d been exploring (he’d heard they wouldn’t come to an agreement with the Communists divvying up the expected profits) nor had he any desire to lose his life fighting for the U.S. oil companies who were trying to muscle their way in.
(N.B. No, he was not one of the dentists who volunteered for Nam. His commander got him shipped there; I could understand why.)
The gubment also limited the “purple machines” that decoded Japanese traffic. Hawaii had one and I believe Guam did but nothing further west.
Wonder why?
By the time of Pearl Harbor, eight Purple analogs had been built by the Signals Intelligence Service. The SIS had one at Arlington Hall in Virginia (plus a spare), two others used for parallel processing and key recovery, one was in the Philippines, one in Singapore (later moved to India as the Japanese advanced), and the one intended for Pearl Harbor got redirected to England.
The Japanese Type B cipher and machines (that we called “Purple”) were used by the Japanese Foreign Service. That is to say, it was their diplomatic code. The military used entirely different systems. Indeed, the IJA and IJN didn’t cooperate much in this (or anything else). I don’t think it would be going too far to say they only trusted each other to the extent that that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. They were usually bitter rivals. We didn’t get much of a break into the then-current variant of the Japanese naval code JN-25 (the main one most of the war) until April, 1942, when we were reading about one word in five. As during much of the Battle of the Atlantic, very efficient direction finding and traffic analysis was often more useful. Especially whenever the enemy introduced new variant code books or machines, such as the Kriegsmarine’s four-rotor Enigma M4 with additional settings and stricter procedures.
Great overview of how we go to war.
It is amazing that when you look sources in that time period, everyone knew a Japanese attack was imminent.
I had a book in the 70s that featured a photocopy of a Honolulu headline asking if the Japs would attack that weekend. It was dated two weeks before the 7th.
The question is, why were our battleships all in one place?
The BBs were all old, and they had to look credible. Tell that to the men trapped/still trapped in the USS Arizona.
The piece on Russian Arctic bases is interesting in light of our recent acquisition of rights to military operation in Greenland.
Isn’t it, though? Russia is an Arctic country. You’d think they’d know better. It’s a good lesson for the US.
Prudhoe Bay comes to mind. Amazing what can be done when the government isn’t in the way.
So, #43 was “disappointed and responsible” after letting Dick Cheney talk him into going into Iraq. I’d feel so much better about that meaningless utterance if he’d suffered any actual consequences for it.
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BTW, was there ever a politician with a more deserving first name than Cheney?
Yeah, Alley for AOC; I understand that’s where she did most of her business
Whoever they were, they overpaid.
How dare you make assumptions about the big teeth.
Maybe some fellas are partial to that kind of thing.
We know Cenk Uygur likes horses. Not that far a stretch from horses to jackasses (though the proper term is “jill” IIRC).
You forgot about the Russian Czarina Catherine the Great, known for her love of equestrian sports.
You might be making quite the leap in assuming Cenk prefers jennies to jacks.
I loved the senior citizen jokes, until I realized my retirement is only s few years away. I then started to take notes.
You missed an important point about the lead-in to the Pacific War – recruiting
and equipping a fake mercenary air unit from the USAAC, and deploying it to
the CBI theater to fight against Japan. When the IJN hit Pearl, transports were
headed West to Burma carrying B-25s to be used in strikes on the Home Islands.
Not very non-warlike. I don;t think it was done to “save Britain”, I think FDR just
wanted to destroy Japan. He always wanted to since he was a young SecNav. IDK
if he hated them, or just wanted them out of the Pacific so we could play there
w/o interference. In hindsight, I also think we could have worked much better with
Imperial Japan as the top dog in the Pacific Rim instead of the ChiComs, but once
they bombed Pearl – fuck ’em.
*
I would also suggest that although not the stated Casus Belli, Iraq was in continuous
armed violation of the terms of our cease-fire with them; firing on our aircraft weekly,
etc. So no sympathy from me, there. There were also tons of chemical weapons stashed
all over the country, of various age.
– Kle.
>we could have worked much better with Imperial Japan
The Japanese are just as much ethnosupremacist, and weirdly inscrutable [1], as the Chinese [2]. Both are almost as ethnosupremacist as the people who currently lead America around by the nose. The failings of the Chinese and the Japanese are: 1) unable to talk a good game [i.e. bullshit convincingly] in English; 2) lack of crypsis; 3) no Scofield equivalent.
[1] The Japanese difference is that they have better manners about it (so long as you do not show weakness) compared with the Chinese, who overall have appalling manners.
[2] Koreans, caught between the Chinks and the Japs, hate them both. Not without good reason. And probably about as much as the Poles hate the Germans and the Russians.
I think you’re confused about the B-25s. The Dutch government-in-exile had signed a contract in June, 1941 for 162 B-25s for delivery in 1942 (almost all production this new bomber then going to the US Army Air Corps). The desperate Dutch ended up paying cash for 60 planes to be transferred from USAAC to go to the Dutch East Indies in the spring of 1942. The first 8 planes were to be delivered in February 1942, another 20 in March, then the rest. Some were to go via the South Atlantic route to Bangalore, India, where the Dutch would take possession, and then onwards. The rest were to go the Pacific route via Australia. Only a bare handful had arrive in either India or Australia before the Dutch East Indies capitulated in March, 1942.
Now the American Volunteer Group (“Flying Tigers”) began training in Burma in their spiffy new P-40Bs from August 1941, and Lend-Lease aid to China was working its way along the Burma Road. The AVG went into combat near Rangoon, Burma and Kunming, China in the last half of December 1941. Now Chennault did hope to form an eventual bomber group and another fighter group, but that what he did have was already operating on a shoestring, and many of the pilots of the original fighter group weren’t even fully trained when the Japanese attacked. More than a few had grossly exaggerated their flying experience. His hopes for a bomber group were aborted before conception.
And let’s be real. The *only* way we could’ve “worked better” with the extremely militaristic and aggressively expansionist Empire of Japan would’ve been to turn our back on China and the ongoing Japanese atrocities, of which the Rape of Nanking was just the largest. It would’ve been like making nice with Germany by letting it conquer all the Lebensraum they wanted in the east. read up on Generalplan Ost some time. Making nice with Japan by sacrificing China would’ve involved something near to the same level of moral pollution on our part. Supporting China was arguably better than supporting Stalin, but we quite rightfully saw Nazi Germany as the more dangerous near-term threat.
It would take me a long time to find the references now, but the B-25s
to deniably strike Japan was an actual, confirmed thing. It was only a
dozen or two, but getting all outraged about Japan first-striking us
(as if that isn’t just sound military tactics) because they got to it before
we got around to doing it to them is somewhat disingenuous.
*
Yes, the Imperial Japanese were awful.
So were essentially every Chinese faction. We helped the Nationalists,
who were somewhat better than the Chi-Coms, despite their “rape”
of not a few Chinese cities, including Nanking, and then threw them over
after WW2, because the Democrats in our government preferred
Communism, as always. Then almost all of China and some other nearby
countries were subjected by the Chi-Coms to brutality of a degree that
The Chrysanthemum Throne could only have dreamed of (and almost
without doubt regularly did dream of, literally). China was, and always has been,
just as awful as Japan. It is the traditional way of civilization and war in that part
of the world, and mostly still is. We weren’t picking a “good guy” in the fight, there was
no good guy. We were picking a side we thought was weak and that we could
exploit, because we are arrogant suckers and didn’t want competition in the Pacific.
*
When I say we could probably have worked better with IJ than the PRC, I mean that
literally. Japan just wanted to be like the West, and have the things the West had.
When the West was tearing out colonial Empires, we did so with variable but not
inconsiderable brutality, too. I say this as a _proponent_ of colonialism, who thinks
it did far more good than harm. The Red Chinese, OTOH, along with all Communist-oid
nations / movements / etc. hate Western civilization (pretty much any real civilization,
for that matter) and wish to destroy it. Which sounds like a better potential partner
to you? Both are viciously brutal, so there’s not really anything to choose from there.
Besides, the influence of wealth and Westernism gradually made the RoC and RoK and
several other horrible places into relatively decent places over time, it isn’t impossible
that Japan would have moderated too. Communist governments never really seem to.
– Kle.
My completely ‘cheap seat’ opinion on the war ‘thing’: The best ‘war’ option is to anticipate the latest world lunatic and stop them before they expand beyond their borders…avoids war in the sense we understand it to be. This is carrying the biggest stick and warning the despots and power-mongers to not even try…similar to what PDJT said to Iran at the UN confab, ‘screw around any more and we’ll bury you’ (which sent the emoting class all a tither). Big stick. This also has the benefit of keeping the IMC from ramping up (spit!pit!) and politicians getting their useless hands into the mix.
Ps. I do believe had Trump been in office at the time the Russian-Ukrainian war would not have happened or certainly not been this protracted.
No, it would not have happened. 100% certain.
Hominids appeared 15-20 million years ago. Most, as shown in archaeology findings, were violent. As a species we seem to need conflict.
The phrase “chimping out,” as applied to inner-city conduct, seems to connect some categories of the living with their ancestors. Is that why they are so triggered at the sight of a banana?
Something in the city air that triggers their DNA to tribal-level mentality more so than their Caucasian counterparts, as if it’s built into the wiring. Watch any 48 Hours etc program and this runs rampant, and usually for no good reason other than ‘I have a gun so that makes me courageous despite being a punk.
>Weapons of Mass Destruction – was likewise based on a lie
http://www.un.org/apps/news/printinfocusnews.asp?nid=354
Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tonnes and that the quality was poor and the product unstable. Consequently, it was said, that the agent was never weaponised. Iraq said that the small quantity of agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.
UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared. Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.
There’s a lot more in that document, if you can find it.
Extended-range missiles:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alpha+company+iraq+diary
Vietnam and Korea had to be fought, by us, to stop communism. This seems to be an issue that will always be decided by emotion. Ollie was a patriot.
As for Kuwait, I’ve never decided if it was just mixed-up communications inside a too-big Deep State bureaucracy or an active plot to remove Saddam. And Saddam did have to go, by any means necessary. Bush was a CIA guy…I wonder what he was really thinking…
I’m minded of the Artist’s Rifles group during WWII. Turned into the SAS.
21st SAS Regiment (Reserve)