Three Score and Seven Years Ago....

Ask a parent or grandparent where they were 67 years ago today. If they’re around 85 or older, they’ll remember easily. Everybody remembers where they were when they heard about the attack on Peal Harbor. They probably had no idea where it was before that day. Today it’s on Page 21 of my local newspaper.

There have been a lot of comparisons between Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11, 2001. About 2400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor attacks. The number is uncertain because of missing persons, possible duplicate names and discrepancies in the reasons for some deaths in the months following. About 3,000 died on September 11. The number is uncertain because of missing persons, possible duplicate names, and discrepancies in the reasons for some deaths in the years following.
In the Pearl Harbor attack Americans killed 55 Japanese. In the September 11 attacks19 terrorists killed themselves.

In the week after Pearl Harbor, news stories and personal memories agree that there were lines around the block at military recruiting stations, coast to coast. Through November 1941 the Marines enlisted 2,000 per month. In December that jumped to 8,500. They would have had 8,501 but when my friend Pete Gustaitis got to the head of the line they told him they were out of forms and come back in a week. He didn’t because two days later he got a draft notice from the Army. In January 1942 the Marines had 13,000.
If you look at Statistical Abstracts of the United States, you can figure out that between 1941 and 1945 80% of males aged 20-24 served in the military. I remember that when my dad met people of his age, nobody ever asked “Are you a veteran?” The question was “Where did you serve?”

Modern military recruitment statistics are incredibly hard to find on the internet. I may be paranoid, but I had the impression nobody in an official position wants to make it easy for you to get the data. You can go back through news reports year by year, but I didn’t have time to do that, or to order any of several books that cover the subject. So let’s go with what I found.
In the days after 9/11 the Marine recruiting office in New York was getting 20 calls a day. The national Army recruiting website went from 400 to 742 visitors per day and from 200 to 500 emails per day. Those numbers would form a line around the block -- if you borrowed the block from a nearby daycare nursery. In September 2001 there were lines around the block to buy little flags to put on your car or in your yard. There were lines to buy CDs of soupy songs with lines like “America, where eagles fly.” Eagles also fly in places like the former Soviet Union, not to mention in Afghanistan. They also fly in France where their diet is not known to include cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan, saying “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Germany declared war on the U.S. the next day. (Bet you thought we went first, didn’t you?)
On September 20, 2001, George W. Bush said “We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” He also said, “What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children… uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here.” That’s not much sacrifice to ask of a population going into a global war.
Roosevelt asked for no sacrifices at all. He had the mechanisms to force people to sacrifice. He had the draft, which had passed Congress by one vote. He had rationing boards. He had taxes – 15 milion people filed in 1940, and 50 million filed in 1945. Revenues went from $7 billion to $50 billion. He had war bonds. Did you know that during World War II the Federal debt quintupled from $40 billion to $200 million? Reagan and Bush together only managed to quadruple it, proving again what spendthrifts the Democrats are.

In that same speech Bush said, “No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith…” One of the things Bush got right was not blaming, and not allowing others to blame, the innocent wholesale for the sins of people with whom they happened to share some common element. In February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which provided for internment of people with German, Italian or Japanese family origins. Woodrow Wilson, the paragon of human love and virtue, did the same thing with German families in World War I. You know when Executive Order 9066 was rescinded? In 1976, by Gerald Ford.

In his 1940 campaign Roosevelt told the public, “…I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” He absolutely knew this was a lie because he was doing his level best to get us into the war, if he could only get somebody else to shoot first. (That doesn’t mean he wanted Pearl Harbor to happen, or in any way made it happen. But it did achieve a goal that he was trying to achieve by other less catastrophic means.)
In his 2000 campaign George Bush said “We are not going to get into nation building.” This was not a lie; it was almost certainly his sincere intent at the time. At present, it looks like his biggest mistake was not breaking that campaign pledge enough. We should have gone into Afghanistan and Iraq both with the intent of nation building instead of military whup-ass.

After World War II we went nation-building big time, for enemies as well as allies. That spawned among other things “The Mouse That Roared,” a Peter Sellers movie about a small nation that declares war on the U.S. so it can lose and get all its economic problems fixed by a post-war aid plan.
May we should offer an incentive plan to Al Queda. We haven’t caught Obama after seven years – twelve if you count the time Clinton spent looking for him. Maybe it’s time to switch from the stick to the carrot. We could lure him out with promises of luxury, bring him to the U.S. and feed him fast food until he dies of a heart attack.