What Ari Fleischer OMITS: Germany declared war on US Dec. 11, 1941, then ATTACKED with U-boats:

[Faryn Balyncd]

Links for video:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Ari_Fleischer_uses_wounded_vet_in_0822.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siB9QyMOFpE
Hardball Transcript:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20408966/

Ari Fleischer:

"That‘s like saying we have never should have gone into Germany because, after all, it was just the Japanese who attacked at Pearl Harbor."

This is Fleischer's response to Mike Barnicle on MSNBC Hardball. Barnacle had just played the new 15 million dollar GOP pro-Iraq War ad depicting airplanes flying into the World Trade Center:

"BARNICLE: Ari, the ad is so powerful—the visual aspect of the ad is so powerful, with that wonderful, noble young man and the sight of that plane flying into the World Trade Center, filled with Saudi terrorists, not Iraqis, could lead several Americans, I would expect, to think that, Oh, Iraq was in on 9/11. Don‘t you think so?

Fleischer's response is becoming a standard Limbaugh/Hannity/Snow/Fox News talking point.

By referencing Pearl Harbor, these neocon imply that the legal & moral basis for U.S. military action in Europe during WW2 was Pearl Harbor (just as they would abuse the memory of 9/11 to justify the occupation of Iraq), rather than specific actions of Germany herself.

But this does not square with the facts.

Unlike Iraq, Germany declared & initiated war on the United States, declaring war on 12-11-41, deploying U-boats to our shores, and initiated attacks upon American vessels:

Japan, Italy, and Germany Declare War on the United States


.....In Berlin on December 8, 1941, Adolf Hitler was elated. “We have ally that has not been defeated in 1500 years!” he told Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels. On December 11, 1941, Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag. Confused and rambling, he compared his own childhood of poverty to that of the wealthy Roosevelt. He declared war on the United States.

In doing so, he ensured his own destruction. UK Prime Minster Winston Churchill, when he heard of Pearl Harbor, remarked, “so we have won after all!” The American public would have been quite content with dealing with Japan and leaving the European War to the Europeans. The treachery of the Japanese attack burned bright in the minds of most Americans, and they wanted revenge. If not for the declaration of war by Germany, Roosevelt would have had a hard time justifying declaring war on Germany until Japan was destroyed. But Germany did declare war, and the U-boats moved the Eastern seaboard in January 1942.


The United States was completely unprepared for the U-boat war that was about to descend on it. While the Neutrality Patrol had ensured safe passage of merchant ships bound for England under US Navy protection, she did not have enough escorts for her own waters. Also, the U-boats operated far from the coast of the United States. Her inland merchant fleet saw no need to adopt the measures the British suggested. Convoys, coastal blackouts, watch stations, and other precautions were ignored.

The result was a slaughter. The U-boat commanders called it Operation Drumbeat — Paukenschlag — and very little was available to stop them. Yachtsmen used to plying the calm summer waters of the coast were sent far out into the Atlantic in winter, facing a greater threat from the weather than of combat.

For three critical months, the United States did not sink a single U-boat operating off the United States or the Mediterranean. On March 1, 1942, a US Navy PBO Ventura sank U-656 off Newfoundland.

US Navy Admiral Ernest J. King, who obsessed about the war in the Pacific, did not recognize the importance of convoys until it was too late. A blackout of coastal cities was not ordered, allowing U-boats to use the city skylines to illuminate the outlines of ships. Residents of beachfront towns would watch the burning ships offshore at night and discover dead sailors washed up on the beach the next day.

The Coast Guard, now part of the Navy, stepped up patrols and the building of antisubmarine escorts. The Navy pressed blimps into service to supplement long-range aircraft. But the US Army Air Corps and the US Navy argued, like RAF Coastal Command and RAF Bomber Command before them, about allocating lone-range aircraft to strategic missions or for antisubmarine patrols.

The destruction was greater than that at Pearl Harbor, and despite the secrecy of the losses, the American people began to accept that they would have to fight Germany as well. The war right offshore could not be hidden completely form the public.

http://www.worldwar2database.com/html/us_war.htm

Before December 1941, Roosevelt believed war with Germany was inevitable, but initially lacked the legal basis to declare war on Germany. This all changed when the German (and Italian) declarations of war on the United States 4 days after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor were followed by U-boats off our eastern seaboard and German attacks on American vessels.

Unfortunately, defenders of the Bush administration's pre-emptive war policies are no more concerned with historical fact than with "Just War" principles, or with whether or not the Bush/Cheney administration had a legal, moral, and factual basis necessitating our pre-emptive attack and permanent occupation of Iraq.

Fleisher now tells us that the reason we used for going to war in 2003 is no longer relevant.

But he ignores (at our peril) the consequences that accrue to those who pursue invasions not justified by facts. And the unending bitterness that accrues to those who construct bases for permanent occupation, all the while continuing to deny such ambitions.

Those unrestrained by historical facts are not inclined to heed the words, or learn from the wisdom of a more successful commander in chief.









"All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time...I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." --President (and former Supreme Commander Allied Expeditioanary Forces in Europe) Dwight Eisenhower, 1953, upon being presented with plans to wage preventive war to disarm Stalin's Soviet Union

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower declared in the spring of 1953, as he was dialing down the Korea conflict. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children......This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

[tanyev]

1. Hey, you need to watch what you do and watch what you say.

Or Ari will report you.

[mr_hat]

2. By Ari's "logic", we've yet to attack the Japanese.

Who would be the Saudis, right?

[Kagemusha]

3. Um, with all due respect, wasn't Germany's alliance with Japan reason enough?

You seem to think that if a military ally of a country that has attacked the US ,doesn't attack the US personally, the US cannot wage war against that country, allied by military treaty with one's enemy. That's new to me.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Of course, Iraq was not only not an ally of those who did attack us;

Saddam was their mortal enemy. He was, in their eyes, a heretic and infidel for leading a secular state and he was, in fact, an equal opportunity oppressor of Shia, Kurds and yes, Sunni - it was probably more dangerous to be in his inner circle than to be distant, under-the-radar opposition.

The parallel is not attacking German after Japan started the war, but attacking Canada after Japan started the war.

[Journeyman]

4. The Germans attacked US ships with U-boats long before Pearl Harbor. . .

The USS Ruben James was sunk by U-536 on October 31, 1941 -- 115 men were lost, only 45 survived. It wasn't the first ship attacked, either.


edit: typo

[bluerum]

5. They were hitting "civilian" shipping carrying supplies to the allies. eom

[Journeyman]

6. And "The Rube" was a US Navy Destroyer. . .

escorting British ships to Iceland.

There were very few "neutrals" on either side of the Atlantic in those years. . .

[Supersedeas]

8. in the minds of these Neo-fascists, all history (ALL HISTORY) is subject to political revision